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KIVERSIDE ESSAYS 

EDITED BY 

ADA L. F. SNELL 

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH 
MOUNT HOLYOKE COLLEGE 






THE AMERICAN MIND AND AMERICAN IDEALISM. By 
Bliss Perry. 35 cents. 

UNIVERSITY SUBJECTS.' By John Henry Newman. 35 
cents. 

STUDIES IN NATURE AND LITERATURE. By John Bur- 
roughs. 35 cents. 

PROMOTING GOOD CITIZENSHIP. By James Bryce. 35 
cents 

Prices are net, postpaid 
Other titles in preparation 

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 
Boston Nbw York Chicago 



UNIYEESITY SUBJECTS 

BY 

JOHN HENRY NEWMAN 




BOSTON NEW YORK CHICAGO 

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 



,H55 



COPYRIGHT, 191 3, BY ADA L. F. SNELL 
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 

R. L. S. 225 



CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS 
U . S . A 



.f^ n A oa -I 



V.' 



CONTENTS 

What is a University? 1 

The Site of a University 13 

Definition of a Liberal Education . . . .20 
Knowledge viewed in Relation to Learning , 24 
The Aim of University Training . . . .53 

Definition of a Gentleman 56 

Literature 59 



INTRODUCTION 

The life story of Cardinal Newman is a story char- 
acterized by no stirring clash of events and by very 
little picturesque action. The narrative is almost 
wholly subjective, for it has to do preeminently with 
the unfolding and growth of a religious spirit. The 
theme of this soul-drama is the search for a religion 
so authoritative that man's feverish struggle to com- 
prehend God will be forever quieted. Although this is 
undoubtedly the dominating motive of Newm^'s life, 
it is nevertheless not his formulation of a system of re- 
ligion which to-day wins him attention, but rather his 
literary work which, combining in its structure a con- 
sciously strict method and a singular charm of manner, 
is generally thought to be quite as beautiful as any 
produced in the nineteenth century. Since, however, 
Newman's view of life, his personality, is inextricably 
interwoven in his writing, some knowledge of the man 
himself and the objects to which he gave his energies 
is necessary for an appreciation of the peculiar power 

of his prose. 

John Henry Newman was born in London in 1801, 
the eldest son of a prosperous business man. From his 
letters we learn that he was brought up to take delight 
in reading the Bible ; as a boy he also enjoyed such 
books as Scott's novels, Pope's " Essay on Man," and 
various writings on religious subjects. At the age of 
sixteen we find him bropding over liheological problems. 



viii INTRODUCTION 

He had in him always a strong strain of mysticism. 
" I used to wish," he says, " that the 'Arabian Nights ' 
were true. My imagination ran on unknown influ- 
ences, on magical powers, and talismans. I thought life 
might be a dream, or I an angel, and all the world a 
deception, my fellow angels, by a playful device, con- 
cealing themselves from me, and deceiving me with a 
semblance of a material world." Like all imaginative 
youths he early showed an ardent desire for self-ex- 
pression ; in his school days he started a little paper ; 
he was always composing verse ; and a favorite prose 
form, even in his boyhood, was the sermon. 

When Newman was sixteen years old he entered 
Trinity College, Oxford. His first letters home are 
much like those of the ordinary college lad. He tells 
of his visit to the tailor and of his first dinner. " Fish, 
flesh and fowl, beautiful salmon, haunches of mutton, 
lamb, etc., fine strong beer ; served up in old pewter 
plates and misshapen earthenware jugs. Tell Mamma 
there were gooseberry, raspberry, and apricot pies." 
He writes home also of his work and of his deter- 
mination to compete for a scholarship, and of his 
excitement when he was told he had won it. But the 
remarkable thing about the letters of this sixteen-year- 
old freshman is the deeply religious note in them. 
Something of the character of the young man as he 
was at this time is further seen from a portrait : the 
craggy profile, with its Roman nose and massive chin, 
shows a rugged determination ; there is already some- 
thing in the expression which is clerical; most dis- 
tinctly, however, the boyish face suggests the poet. 
We do not wonder that the most brilliant college men 
of the day came to the rooms of this lad, shy and awk- 



INTRODUCTION ix 

ward though he was ; and that they all talked together 
of the eternal mysteries of life, as is still the way of 
college youths. All his days Newman tenderly loved 
his college, even when in exile from it and suspected 
by its highest authorities. He graduated from Trinity 
without honors ; it seems that he overtrained for the 
examinations, and lost his head when he was called up, 
a day in advance, for the final test ; but he more than 
retrieved his honor as a student when, a year later, he 
won a fellowship at Oriel College. But the one dis- 
tinctive quality which marked him throughout his col- 
lege life, in victory and in defeat, was a deeply reli- 
gious feeling evident in such sentences as that which he 
wrote when anxious about the Oriel fellowship ; " O 
Lord ! dispose of me as will best promote thy glory, 
but give me resignation and contentment." 

The next few years were years of steady growth in 
power and influence. Newman took orders for the 
church, was appointed tutor in Oriel, and became 
Vicar of St. Mary's, preaching there his " Parochial 
Sermons" and others which the undergraduates 
flocked to hear. The year 1832 marked^ a turning 
point in Newman's career. He went on a journey to 
Italy and various other southern countries. After 
wandering in many places for many months, he finally 
returned to Sicily alone and fell ill there with a fever. 
Recovering at length from this sickness which had 
been so severe that his life was despaired of, he was pos- 
sessed with the one idea that he must go back to Eng- 
land immediately ; for it had come to him in his fever, 
like a vision from heaven, that he had a great work to 
do there. While waiting for a ship to carry him home 
and while still very weak, he would say over and over, 



X INTRODUCTION 

" I have a work to do." To this strong prepossession 
may be traced the beginning of a great movement, 
which, according to Professor Saintsbury, changed the 
intellectual as well as the ecclesiastical face of Eng- 
land. After many delays Newman secured passage on 
a ship bound for France, but, as if to try his patience 
stin further, he was becalmed for some days in the 
Mediterranean. In profound homesickness for Eng- 
land, for the faces of his friends, and in an emotional 
ferment to undertake his work, the nature of which 
was yet hidden from him, he wrote " Lead, Kindly 
Light," a hymn which has become a Pilgrim hymn 
for men of every faith. 

Arrived in England he was soon associated with a 
group of young men that had for its object no less a 
task than the reformation of the Church of England. 
To understand the purpose of these men some know- 
ledge of the conditions of that time is essential ; but 
it must be remembered that the situation is capable 
of many interpretations, and that necessarily only a 
few aspects of the movement can be given here. In 
the eighteenth century, as everyone knows, society, 
politics, literature had frozen into hard conventions , 
and with these religion also had congealed into set and 
meaningless forms. The clergy were machines, but 
were alive enough for fox-hunting, tea, and cards ; 
good fuU-length portraits of them as they were may 
be found in the works of Jane Austen. The church 
preserved the symbols, but these had lost signifi- 
cance ; and its stately ceremonies were without mean- 
ing. But already at the beginning of the nmeteenth 
century governments were being liberalized ; liter- 
ature was throbbing with a life renewed and quick- 



INTRODUCTION xi 

ened by the study of a fresher and earlier time ; and 
it was natural that the church also should feel this 
animating spirit abroad everywhere. Theological stu- 
dents began to study the history of primitive Christian 
times ; and they found that the church in those early 
days abounded in energy, buoyancy, and faith. There 
was in it a gladness, a light which had lightened every 
man. To bring this back again to the church was the 
purpose of that group of Oxford men who dreamed of 
a new order in the days of 1833. 

Obviously men of different minds would adopt 
different means to restore vitality to religion ; and 
already there were various groups of persons holding 
opposing theories. A closer study of the Bible as an 
authority — a study of the lives of Christ and the 
apostles with the purpose of understanding the secret 
of their power — this was the way of the Evangelicals. 
To give up all dogma, the holding of which, it was 
argued, threw the emphasis on systems rather than on 
spiritual living; to abandon the idea that the church 
is endowed with supernatural powers ; to let each man 
read the Bible for himself and exercise his private 
judgment in its interpretation — this was the way of 
the Liberals. But this was not Newman's way. He 
had no sympathy with or understanding of that serene 
faith which is able to rise above scepticism, which 
faces freely any new truth however startling, which 
needs and cares for no creeds, knowing that they but 
change and fail, — a faith which connects itself purely 
with the Divine and is not afraid. Newman and his 
Oxford adherents needed a system. They felt that all 
reading and meditation should be done with the sole 
purpose of determining what is authoritative; per- 



xii INTRODUCTION 

sonal interpretation of religious dogma is simply in- 
subordination. The church, in their belief, is the re- 
presentative of Christ on earth, endowed by him with 
supernatural powers, possessed of the whole truth, 
authoritative, infallible, one and indivisible. To believe 
this is all that is needful to restore to mankind the 
divine power which was theirs in the early church. 
" The early times of purity and truth have not passed 
away ! they are present still ! We are not solitary, 
though we seem so," exclaims Newman. Such a po- 
sition as this having been accepted, it became impera- 
tive to show that the Church of England is literally 
a descendant of the Primitive Church, and is there- 
fore possessed of the pure Catholic faith. To establish 
this premise the young Oxford men went searchingly 
to early church history ; and by argument and per- 
suasion attempted to prove a vital connection between 
the Roman and Anglican churches. Along these lines 
the Church of England was to be reformed and the 
hearts of men reclaimed. 

The means adopted was the instruction of the clergy 
through Tracts, called " Tracts for the Times." They 
were written with wonderful directness and earnest- 
ness, and very soon succeeded in thoroughly arousing 
the clergy who, quietly dozing by their firesides or 
riding cross country to hounds, had become quite in- 
different to their task of saving souls. The move- 
ment, called sometimes the Tractarian Movement and 
sometimes the Oxford Movement, spread rapidly; it 
had a strongly idealistic aspect and appealed to the 
awakened romantic sense of the time. Loyal souls who 
had gone to church, only dimly perceiving why, were 
suddenly thrilled to find that the signs and ceremonies 



INTRODUCTION xiii 

Iiad a meaning ; tliat God was literally among his peo- 
ple ; that they might, if they would, see visions, as did 
the holy men of old. Angels might be met with by the 
way, and, even if not visible, attended them daily in 
their tasks ; an innumerable company of saints hov- 
ered near them to hearten them in their discourage- 
ments. " Life is but a parable, angels the real cause 
of motion, light, and heat," Newman teaches ; " Every 
breath of air and ray of heat, every beautiful prospect, 
is, as it were, the skirts of their garments, the waving 
of the robes of those whose faces see God in Heaven." 
The earnestness of the leaders of the movement, their 
sincere faith, their recognized intellectual power won 
confidence for their doctrine, captured the minds and 
hearts of men and women ever so pathetically eager 
to believe heaven a reality. 

Together with the publication of the Tracts, there 
were Newman's four o'clock sermons at St. Mary's. 
These were pure, lucid, free for the most part from 
dogma, and permeated with a spirit of divine things. 
To understand the power of these discourses it is 
necessary to study carefully such sermons as " The In- 
visible World," "The Power of the WiU," and "The 
E,eligious Use of Excited Feelings," the last of which 
is in some points so like Mr. William James's lecture 
on " Habit." One who frequently heard Newman in 
these days thus describes the effect of the sermons : 
" As he spoke, how the old truth became new ! how it 
came home with a meaning never felt before ! . . . After 
the hearing of these sermons you might come away 
still not believing the tenets peculiar to the High 
Church system ; but you would be harder than most 
men, if j^ou did not feel more than ever ashamed of 



xiv INTRODUCTION 

coarseness, selfishness, worldliness, if you did not feel 
the things of faith brought closer to the soul." 

Thus the Tracts and the preaching went on ; and 
the leaders of the Movement, becoming clearer in their 
own minds, and emboldened by success, urged more 
and more the essential oneness of the English and 
Romish churches. But against the movement there was 
also a growing opposition on the part of the Ortho- 
dox party, and, to some extent, on the part of the 
Evangelicals and Liberals; little by little the English 
ingrained suspicion of Romanism was aroused, grew 
in volume, and finally broke in a storm of wrath with 
the appearance of Tract No. 90. In this Tract New- 
man tried to show that even in the Thirty-nine Arti- 
cles drawn up against Romanism, there is much of the 
pure Catholic doctrine. Over this statement the Bish- 
ops began to buzz angrily ; the clergy, sometimes with- 
out reading Newman's carefully chosen words, con- 
demned his position. Finally, after much agitation, 
Newman was persuaded to stop the Tracts altogether. 
His next step, one which stirred both friends and en- 
emies, was to retract all he had ever said against the 
Roman Catholic Church. In 1843 he resigned the 
Vicarage of St. Mary's and retired to Littlemore. 
After many doubts and misgivings, he took, in 1845, 
the climactic step of his life ; in that year he was re- 
ceived into the Roman Catholic Church. It was, he 
tells us in his " Apologia Pro Vita Sua," like coming 
into port after stormy seas. 

The remainder of Newman's life was spent quietly 
in work and in writing for his church. There were 
still many disappointments in store for him ; and for 
years the officials of the Catholic Church were inclined 



INTRODUCTION xv 

to distrust him. Many of his most cherished projects 
were thwarted. In later life, however, his honesty of 
purpose and remarkable gifts were recognized. He was 
appointed Cardinal ; and furthermore, by his account 
of himself in the "Apologia," he created among his 
countrymen a more tender feeling toward himself. 
Englishmen, little by little, acquitted him of dark and 
underhand designs. They read sympathetically his 
beautiful prose ; and however sincerely they might 
question the soundness of his conclusions in religious 
matters, they came to feel that Newman belonged to 
the great mid-century group of men whose quest was 
Truth. After a life which extended over nearly a cen- 
tury, Newman died among his brethren in the Ora- 
tory at Birmingham in 1891. " Ex umbris et ^lagi- 
nibus in veritam" are the words which he chose to 
mark his grave. 

Many of the tenets which Newman held as neces- 
sary to the production of effective prose may be found 
in his lecture on " University Preaching." One of his 
teachings is to keep the object definite ; all frills and 
trimmings are to be avoided as tending to blur the 
thought. Hence, in Newman's prose there is in gene?*al 
no color, no word-flower to set in motion an "alien 
brave wave." Scarcely ever is there even an allusion 
to nature — indeed, when Newman was a young man 
he vowed to renounce the seductive graces of nature. 
In the second volume of letters one comes upon the 
mention of the snapdragons which grew on the walls 
of Trinity College with the same surprise and joy as 
one would, when walking over the brown fields of 
autumn, stumble upon a half -hidden blue gentian. 
There are no garden fancies, no whiff of sweet odors, 



xvi INTRODUCTION 

no singing birds in this " religious retreat," which is as 
unadorned as a Quaker meeting-house. The reason 
for the use of simple language Newman very definitely 
gives : " What he feels himself, and feels deeply, he 
has to make others feel deeply ; and in proportion as 
he comprehends this, he will rise above the temptation 
of introducing collateral matters, and will have no 
taste, no heart, for going aside after flowers of oratory, 
fine figures, tuneful periods, which are worth nothing, 
unless they come to him spontaneously, and are spoken 
' out of the abundance of the heart.' " The mind of 
the reader which is to be led away from the things 
which are seen to those which are unseen must not be 
distracted ; the language must be purely transparent 
and refined sevenfold to carry in its heart the divine 
message. 

Figurative language, then, Newman uses sparingly ; 
in other respects, also, he is careful to keep the expres- 
sion clear and calm. He never uses striking words, 
words which violently explode, as do Carlyle's ; nor 
does he use words which move exclusively in learned 
circles. On the contrary his diction so often savors of 
the workaday world that his style has been called 
colloquial; yet the language is breathed upon by a 
spirit so lofty in character that all earthy association 
disappears, and it creates for the reader only a sense 
of the reality of the thing described, whether it be the 
description of a familiar scene or the explanation of 
the presence of angels among us. Take, for example, 
this paragraph from " The Individuality of the Soul." 

" Or again, survey some populous town : crowds are 
pouring through the streets; some on foot, some in 
carriages ; while the shops are full, and the houses 



INTRODUCTION xvii 

too, could we see into them. Every part of it is full 
of life. Hence we gain a general idea of splendor, 
magnificence, opulence, and energy. But what is the 
truth ? why, that every being in that great concourse 
is his own centre, and all things about him are but 
shades, but a ' vain shadow,' in which he ' walketh 
and disquieteth himself in vain.' He has his own 
hopes and fears, desires, judgments, and aims ; he is 
everything to himself, and no one else is really any- 
thing. No one outside of him can really touch him, 
can touch his soul, his immortality ; he must live 
with himself for ever. He has a depth within him un- 
fathomable, an infinite abyss of existence; and the 
scene in which he bears his part for the moment is 
but like a gleam of sunshine upon the surface." v 

In the use of words there is furthermore a scrupu- 
lous economy. This plain rhetorical requirement New- 
man has versified in a little poem called " Deeds, not 
Words " in which he advocates the pruning of words, 
meaning simply the controlling of thoughts. There is 
never in his prose a " soft, luxurious flow " of lan- 
guage ; but, on the contrary, it is limited according 
to classical restrictions and is disciplined by the high 
truth which it is consecrated to convey. 

Newman's prose shows also a scholarly restraint in 
the use of obvious alliteration, assonance, and " tune- 
ful periods " ; but it has nevertheless, when the author 
is lifted beyond himself, a sweeping grandeur of tone, 
and a highly poetic rhythm and cadence. Words, 
phrases, clauses are piled up into a climactic wave, 
which breaks with the feeling of the writer, and ebbs 
away in lyric music. The exalted tone is often secured 
by a wording tuned to the lofty phraseology of Bibli- 



xviii INTRODUCTION 

cal literature ; there are long, sonorous periods, rhyth- 
mic balance, and simplicity^ of sound due to homely 
idiom. The tone, as a result, is singularly cool, quiet, 
and appealing. Examples are difficult to give, since 
passages as a whole must be read to perceive this 
quality ; but it is found concentrated in some of the 
poems, such as " Rest of Saints Departed." 

They are at rest : 
We may not stir the heaven of their repose 
By rude invoking voice, or prayer addrest 

In waywardness, to those 
Who in the mountain grots of Eden lie, 
And hear the fourfold river as it murmurs by. 

This prose, simple and inevitable as it seems, is, it 
must be remembered, the product of a conscious artist 
trained from his youth up in the technique of expres- 
sion. Speaking of himself as a young writer he says, 
" I seldom wrote without an eye to style, and since my 
taste was bad my style was bad." Toward the end of 
his life he wrote, " It is simply the fact that I have 
been obliged to take great pains with everything I 
have written, and I often write chapters over and 
over again, besides innumerable corrections and inter- 
linear additions. I am not stating this as a merit, only 
that some persons write their best first, and I very 
seldom do. ... I think I never have written for 
writing's sake : but my one and single desire and aim 
has been to do what is so difficult — viz. to express 
clearly and exactly my meaning; this has been the 
motive principle of all my corrections and re-writ- 
ings." How careful he was and intelligent in compo- 
sition is further seen by a study of the logical structure 
of all his sermons and discourses, — a logic which is, 



INTRODUCTION xix 

however, never austere or crudely evident. The expo- 
sition is seemingly unconcerned and easy-going ; yet 
the plan is never lost sight of, however far Newman 
may appear to wander from the point. He himself 
advises the preacher who hopes to make a definite 
impression " to place a distinct categorical proposition 
before him, such as he can write down in the form of 
words, and to guide and limit his preparation by it, 
and to aim in all he says to bring it out, and nothing 
else." 

The conscious artist is further seen in that Newman 
never loses sight of his hearers, of how their minds 
may be working ; he voices for them their objections, 
enters sympathetically into their view of a question, 
overcomes their difficulties, and builds up forHhem 
the position he wishes them to hold. " The precise 
recognition of a hearer," he says, "is an important 
part of the art of speaking." It was this power which 
gave Newman a strong hold on those to whom he wrote 
or spoke, and which made him a skillful controversialist. 
In presenting any question he remembered, too, that 
men are more often moved through their feelings than 
through their minds ; he therefore appeals to their 
imaginations, and, divining their needs, he draws for 
them, in definite and warm tones, the objects toward 
which they aspire. 

The qualities which distinguish Newman as a writer 
are essentially those which distinguish him as a man. 
His graciousness gives to his work a sweetness of tone 
and an old-time courtesy of manner suggestive of the 
ways of gentlefolk. His scholarly mind is seen in the 
logical ordering and mental vigor of such discourses 
as the " Idea of a University " — a book characterized 



XX 



INTRODUCTION 



by Pater as " the perfect handling of a theory." And 
the religious fervor of his nature, his exalted view of 
life, enkindling his words, imparts to his writings a 
power to move the reader, as the men were moved 
who hearing him preach saw the old truths in a new 
light. 



UNIVERSITY SUBJECTS 

WHAT IS A UNIVERSITY ?i 

If I were asked to describe as briefly and popu- 
larly as I could, what a University was, I should draw 
my answer from its ancient designation of a Studium 
Generals, or "School of University Learning." This 
description implies the assemblage of strangers from 
all parts in one spot ; — from all parts ; else, how wiU 
you find professors and students for every department 
of knowledge ? and in one spot ; else, how can there 
be any school at all ? Accordingly, in its simple and 
rudimental form, it is a school of knowledge of every 
kind, consisting of teachers and learners from every 
quarter. Many things are requisite to complete and 
satisfy the idea embodied in this description ; but such 
as this a University seems to be in its essence, a place 
for the communication and circulation of thought, by 
means of personal intercourse, through a wide extent 
of country. 

There is nothing far-fetched or unreasonable in the 
idea thus presented to us ; and if this be a University, 
then a University does but contemplate a necessity of 
our nature, and is but one specimen in a particular me- 
dium, out of many which might be adduced in others, 
of a provision for that necessity. Mutual education, in 

1 From Ttise and Progress of Universities ^ chapter ii. Re- 
printed from volume I, Historical Sketches. 



^ WHAT IS A UNIVERSITY? 

a large sense of the word, is one of the great and in- 
cessant occupations of human society, carried on partly 
with set purpose, and partly not. One generation 
forms another; and the existing generation is ever 
acting and reacting upon itself in the persons of its 
individual members. Now, in this process, books, I 
need scarcely say, that is, the litera scripta^ are one 
special instrument. It is true ; and emphatically so in 
this age. Considering the prodigious powers of the 
press, and how they are developed at this time in the 
never-intermitting issue of periodicals, tracts, pam- 
phlets, works in series, and light literature, we must 
allow there never was a time which promised fairer 
for dispensing with every other means of information 
and instruction. What can we want more, you will 
say, for the intellectual education of the whole man, 
and for every man, than so exuberant and diversified 
and persistent a promulgation of all kinds of know- 
ledge? W^hy, you will ask, need we go up to know- 
ledge, when laiowledge comes down to us ? The Sibyl 
wrote her prophecies upon the leaves of the forest, and 
wasted them ; but here such careless profusion might 
be prudently indulged, for it can be afforded without 
loss, in consequence of the almost fabulous fecundity 
of the instrument which these latter ages have in- 
vented. We have sermons in stones, and books in the 
running brooks ; works larger and more comprehen- 
sive than those which have gained for ancients an im- 
mortality, issue forth every morning, and are projected 
onwards to the ends of the earth at the rate of hun- 
dreds of miles a day. Our seats are strewed, our pave- 
mentjL are powdered, with swarms of little tracts ; and 
the very bricks of our city walls preach wisdom, by 



WHAT IS A UNIVERSITY? 3 

informing us by their placards where we can at once 
cheaply purchase it. 

I allow all this, and much more ; such certainly is 
our popular education, and its effects are remarkable. 
Nevertheless, after all, even in this age, whenever men 
are really serious about getting what, in the language 
of trade, is called " a good article," when they aim at 
something precise, something refined, something really 
luminous, something really large, something choice, 
they go to another market ; they avail themselves, in 
some shape or other, of the rival method, the ancient 
method, of oral instruction, of present communication 
between man and man, of teachers instead of learning, 
of the personal influence of a master, and the humble 
initiation of a disciple, and, in consequence, o^ great 
centres of pilgrimage and throng, which such a method 
of education necessarily involves. This, I think, will 
be found to hold good in all those departments or as- 
pects of society, which possess an interest sufficient to 
bind men together, or to constitute what is called " a 
world." It holds in the political world, and in the high 
world, and in the religious world ; and it holds also in 
the literary and scientific world. 

If the actions of men may be taken as any test of 
their convictions, then we have reason for saying this, 
viz. : that the province and the inestimable benefit of 
the liter a scripta is that of being a record of truth, 
and an authority of appeal, and an instrument of 
teaching in the hands of a teacher ; but that, if we 
wish to become exact and fully furnished in any branch 
of knowledge which is diversified and complicated, we 
must consult the living man and listen to his living 
voice. I am not bound to investigate the cause of this, 



4 WHAT IS A UNIVERSITY? 

and anything I may say will, I am conscious, be short 
of its full analysis ; — perhaps we may suggest, that no 
books can get through the number of minute questions 
which it is possible to ask on any extended subject, or 
can hit upon the very difficulties which are severally 
felt by each reader in succession. Or again, that no 
book can convey the special spirit and delicate pecu- 
liarities of its subject with that rapidity and certainty 
which attend on the sympathy of mind with mind, 
through the eyes, the look, the accent, and the man- 
ner, in casual expressions thrown off at the moment, 
and the unstudied turns of familiar conversation. But 
I am already dwelling too long on what is but an in- 
cidental portion of my main subject. Whatever be the 
cause, the fact is undeniable. The general principles 
of any study you may learn by books at home ; but 
the detail, the colour, the tone, the air, the life which 
makes it live in us, you must catch all these from 
those in whom it lives already. You must imitate the 
student in French or German, who is not content with 
his grammar, but goes to Paris or Dresden : you must 
take example from the young artist, who aspires to 
visit the great Masters in Florence and in Rome. Till 
we have discovered some intellectual daguerreotype, 
which takes off the course of thought, and the form, 
lineaments, and features of truth, as completely and 
minutely, as the optical instrument reproduces the 
sensible object, we must come to the teachers of wis- 
dom to learn wisdom, we must repair to the fountain, 
and drink there. Portions of it may go from thence 
to the ends of the earth by means of books; but the 
fulness is in one place alone. It is in such assemblages 
and congregations of intellect that books themselves, 



WHAT IS A UNIVERSITY? 5 

the masterpieces of human genius, are written, or at 
least originated. 

The principle on which I have been insisting is so 
obvious, and instances in point are so ready, that I 
should think it tiresome to proceed with the subject, 
except that one or two illustrations may serve to ex- 
plain my own language about it, which may not have 
done justice to the doctrine which it has been intended 
to enforce. 

For instance, the polished manners and high-bred 
bearing which are so difficult of attainment, and so 
strictly personal when attained, — which are so much 
admired in society, from society are acquired. AU 
that goes to constitute a gentleman, — the carriage, 
gait, address, gestures, voice ; the ease, the self-Jlosses- 
sion, the courtesy, the power of conversing, the talent 
of not offending; the lofty principle, the delicacy of 
thought, the happiness of expression, the taste and 
propriety, the generosity and forbearance, the candour 
and consideration, the openness of hand ; — these quali- 
ties, some of them come by nature, some of them may 
be found in any rank, some of them are a direct precept 
of Christianity ; but the full assemblage of them, 
bound up in the unity of an individual character, do 
we expect they can be learned from books ? are they 
not necessarily acquired, where they are to be found, 
in high society ? The very nature of the case leads 
us to say so ; you cannot fence without an antagonist, 
nor challenge all comers in disputation before you 
have supported a thesis ; and in like manner, it stands 
to reason, you cannot learn to converse till you have 
the world to converse with ; you cannot unlearn your 
natural bashfulness, or awkwardness, or stiffness, or 



6 WHAT IS A UNIVERSITY? 

other besetting deformity, till you serve your time in 
some school of manners. Well, and is it not so in 
matter of fact ? The metropolis, the court, the great 
houses of the land, are the centres to which at stated 
times the country comes up, as to shrines of refine- 
ment and good taste ; and then in due time the coun- 
try goes back again home, enriched with a portion of 
the social accomplishments, which those very visits 
serve to call out and heighten in the gracious dis- 
pensers of them. We are unable to conceive how the 
" gentlemanlike " can otherwise be maintained ; and 
maintained in this way it is. 

And now a second instance : and here, too, I am 
going to speak without personal experience of the 
subject I am introducing. I admit I have not been in 
Parliament, any more than I have figured in the 
heau monde; yet I cannot but think that statesman- 
ship, as well as high breeding, is learned, not by 
books, but in certain centres of education. If it be 
not presumption to say so. Parliament puts a clever 
man au coiirant with politics and affairs of state in a 
way surprising to himself. A member of the Legis- 
lature, if tolerably observant, begins to see things 
with new eyes, even though his views undergo no 
change. Words have a meaning now, and ideas a 
reality, such as they had not before. He hears a vast 
deal in public speeches and private conversation, 
which is never put into print. The bearings of meas- 
ures and events, the action of parties, and the persons 
of friends and enemies, are brought out to the man 
who is in the midst of them with a distinctness, which 
the most diligent perusal of newspapers will fail to 
impart to them. It is access to the fountain-heads of 



WHAT IS A UNIVERSITY? 7 

political wisdom and experience, it is daily inter- 
course, of one kind or another, with the multitude 
who go up to them, it is familiarity with business, it 
is access to the contributions of fact and opinion 
thrown together by many witnesses from many quar- 
ters, which does this for him. However, I need not 
account for a fact, to which it is sufficient to appeal ; 
that the Houses of Parliament and the atmosphere 
around them are a sort of University of politics. 

As regards the world of science, we find a remark- 
able instance of the principle which I am illustrating, 
in the periodical meetings for its advance, which have 
arisen in the course of the last twenty years, such as 
the British Association. Such gatherings would to 
many persons appear at first sight simply pre|)oster- 
ous. Above all subjects of study. Science is conveyed, 
is propagated, by books, or by private teaching ; ex- 
periments and investigations are conducted in silence ; 
discoveries are made in solitude. What have philos- 
ophers to do with festive celebrities, and panegyrical 
solemnities with mathematical and physical truth? 
Yet on a closer attention to the subject, it is found 
that not even scientific thought can dispense with the 
suggestions, the instruction, the stimulus, the sym- 
pathy, the intercourse with mankind on a large scale, 
which such meetings secure. A fine time of year is 
chosen, when days are long, skies are bright, the earth 
smiles, and all nature rejoices ; a city or town is taken 
by turns, of ancient name or modern opulence, where 
buildings are spacious and hospitality hearty. The 
novelty of place and circumstance, the excitement of 
strange, or the refreshment of well-known faces, the 
majesty of rank or of genius, the amiable charities of 



8 WHAT IS A UNIVEKSITY? 

men pleased both with themselves and with each 
other ; the elevated spirits, the circulation of thought, 
the curiosity; the morning sections, the outdoor exer- 
cise, the well-furnished, well-earned board, the not 
ungraceful hilarity, the evening circle ; the brilliant 
lecture, the discussions or collisions or guesses of great 
men one with another, the narratives of scientific pro- 
cesses, of hopes, disappointments, conflicts, and suc- 
cesses, the splendid eulogistic orations ; these and the 
like constituents of the annual celebration are con- 
sidered to do something real and substantial for the 
advance of knowledge which can be done in no other 
way. Of course they can but be occasional ; they an- 
swer to the Annual Act, or Commencement, or Com- 
memoration, of a University, not to its ordinary con- 
dition ; but they are of a University nature ; and I 
can well believe in their utility. They issue in the 
promotion of a certain living and, as it were, bodily 
communication of knowledge from one to another, of a 
general interchange of ideas, and a comparison and 
adjustment of science with science, of an enlargement 
of mind, intellectual and social, of an ardent love o£ 
the particular study which may be chosen by each 
individual, and a noble devotion to its interests. 

Such meetings, I repeat, are but periodical, and only 
partially represent the idea of a University. The 
bustle and whirl which are their usual concomitants, 
are in ill keeping with the order and gravity of ear- 
nest intellectual education. We desiderate means of 
instruction which involve no interruption of our ordi- 
nary habits ; nor need we seek it long, for the natural 
course of things brings it about, while we debate over 
it. In every great country, the metropolis itself be- 



WHAT IS A UNIVERSITY? 9 

comes a sort of necessary University, whether we will 
or no. As the chief city is the seat of the court, of 
high society, of politics, and of law, so as a matter of 
course is it the seat of letters also ; and at this time, 
for a long term of years, London and Paris are in 
fact and in operation Universities, though in Paris 
its famous University is no more, and in London a 
University scarcely exists except as a board of adminis- 
tration. The newspapers, magazines, reviews, journals, 
and periodicals of all kinds, the publishing trade, the 
libraries, museums, and academies there found, the 
learned and scientific societies, necessarily invest it 
with the functions of a University ; and that atmos- 
phere of intellect, which in a former age hung over 
Oxford or Bologna or Salamanca, has, with the (Siange 
of times, moved away to the centre of civil govern- 
ment. Thither come up youths from all parts of the 
country, the students of law, medicine, and the fine 
arts, and the employes and attaches of literature. 
There they live, as chance determines ; and they are 
satisfied with their temporary home, for they find in it 
all that was promised to them there. They have not 
come in vain, as far as their own object in coming is 
concerned. They have not learned any particular re- 
ligion, but they have learned their own particular pro- 
fession well. They have, moreover, become acquainted 
with the habits, manners, and opinions of their place 
of sojourn, and done their part in maintaining the 
tradition of them. We cannot then be without virtual 
Universities ; a metropolis is such : the simple ques- 
tion is, whether the education sought and given should 
be based on principle, formed upon rule, directed to 
the highest ends, or left to the random succession of 



10 WHAT IS A UNIVERSITY? 

masters and schools, one after another, with a melan- 
choly waste of thought and an extreme hazard of 
truth. 

Religious teaching itself affords us an illustration 
of our subject to a certain point. It does not, indeed, 
seat itself merely in centres of the world; this is im- 
possible from the nature of the case. It is intended for 
the many, not the few ; its subject-matter is truth neces- 
sary for us, not truth recondite and rare ; but it con- 
curs in the principle of a University so far as this, that 
its great instrument, or rather organ, has ever been 
that which nature prescribes in all education, the per- 
sonal presence of a teacher, or, in theological language, 
Oral Tradition. It is the living voice, the breathing 
form, the expressive countenance, which preaches, 
which catechises. Truth, a subtle, invisible, manifold 
spirit, is poured into the mind of the scholar by his 
eyes and ears, through his affections, imagination, and 
reason ; it is poured into his mind and is sealed up 
there in perpetuity, by propounding and repeating it, 
by questioning and requestioning, by correcting and 
explaining, by progressing and then recurring to first 
principles, by all those ways which are implied in the 
word " catechising." In the first ages, it was a work 
of long time ; months, sometimes years, were devoted 
to the arduous task of disabusing the mind of the in- 
cipient Christian of its pagan errors, and of moulding 
it upon the Christian faith. The Scriptures, indeed, 
were at hand for the study of those who could avail 
themselves of them ; but St. Irenaeus does hesitate to 
speak of whole races, who had been converted to Chris- 
tianity, without being able to read them. To be unable 
to read or write was in those times no evidence of 



WHAT IS A UNIVERSITY? 11 

want of learning : the hermits of the deserts were, in 
this sense of the word, illiterate ; yet the great St. 
Anthony, though he knew not letters, was a match in 
disputation for the learned philosophers who came to 
try him. Didymus again, the great Alexandrian theo- 
logian, was blind. The ancient discipline, called the 
Disciplina Arcani, involved the same principle. The 
more sacred doctrines of Revelation were not com- 
mitted to books but passed on by successive tradition. 
The teaching on the Blessed Trinity and the Eucha- 
rist appears to have been so handed down for some 
hundred years ; and when at length reduced to writing, 
it has filled many folios, yet has not been exhausted. 

But I have said more than enough in illustration ; 
I end as I began; — a University is a place ofw con- 
course, whither students come from every quarter for 
every kind of knowledge. You cannot have the best of 
every kind everywhere ; you must go to some great city *^ 
or emporium for it. There you have all the choicest 
productions of nature and art all together, which you 
find each in its own separate place elsewhere. All the 
riches of the land, and of the earth, are carried up 
thither ; there are the best markets, and there the best 
workmen. It is the centre of trade, the supreme court 
of fashion, the umpire of rival talents, and the stand- 
ard of things rare and precious. It is the place for 
seeing galleries of first-rate pictures, and for hearing 
wonderful voices and performers of transcendent skill. 
It is the place for great preachers, great orators, great 
nobles, great statesmen.^n the nature of things, 
greatness and unity go together ; excellence implies a 
centre. And such, for the third or fourth time, is a 
University ; I hope I do not weary out the reader by 



12 WHAT IS A UNIVERSITY? 

repeating it. It is the place to which a thousand 
schools make contributions ; in which the intellect 
may safely range and speculate, sure to find its equal 
in some antagonist activity, and its judge in the tribu- 
nal of truth. It is a place where inquiry is pushed 
forward, and discoveries verified and perfected, and 
rashness rendered innocuous, and error exposed, by 
the collision of mind with mind, and knowledge with 
knowledge. It is the place where the professor becomes 
eloquent, and is a missionary and a preacher, display- 
ing his science in its most complete and most winning 
form, pouring it forth with the zeal of enthusiasm, 
and lighting up his own love of it in the breasts of his 
hearers. It is the place where the catechist makes 
good his ground as he goes, treading in the truth 
day by day into the ready memory, and wedging and 
tightening it into the expanding reason. It is a place 
which wins the admiration of the young by its celeb- 
rity, kindles the affections of the middle-aged by its 
beauty, and rivets the fidelity of the old by its asso- 
ciations. It is a seat of wisdom, a light of the world, 
a minister of the faith, an Alma Mater of the rising 
generation. It is this and a great deal more, and de- 
mands a somewhat better head and hand than mine 
to describe it weU. 



THE SITE OF A UNIVERSITY ^ 

If we would know what a University is, consid- 
ered in its elementary idea, we must betake ourselves 
to the first and most celebrated home of European 
literature and source of European civilization, to 
the bright and beautiful Athens, — Athens, whose 
schools drew to her bosom, and then sent back again 
to the business of life, the youth of the Western 
World for a long thousand years. Seated on the verge 
of the continent, the city seemed hardly suited for the 
duties of a central metropolis of knowledge ; yet, what 
it lost in convenience of approach, it gained in its 
neighbourhood to the traditions of the mysterious East, 
and in the loveliness of the region in which it lay. 
Hither, then, as to a sort of ideal land, where aU 
archetypes of the great and the fair were found in 
substantial being, and all departments of truth ex- 
plored, and all diversities of intellectual power ex- 
hibited, where taste and philosophy were majestically 
enthroned as in a royal court, where there was no 
sovereignty but that of mind, and no nobility but that 
of genius, where professors were rulers, and princes 
did homage, hither flocked continually from the very 
corners of the orbis terrarum, the many-tongued gen- 
eration, just rising, or just risen into manhood, in 
order to gain wisdom. 

^ From Rise and Progress of Universities, chapter ni. Re- 
printed from volume i, Historical Sketches. 



14 THE SITE OF A UNIVERSITY 

Pisistratus had in an early age discovered and 
nursed the infant genius of his people, and Cimon, 
after the Persian war, had given it a home. That war 
had established the naval supremacy of Athens ; she 
had become an imperial state ; and the lonians, bound 
to her by the double chain of kindred and of subjec- 
tion, were importing into her both their merchandise 
and their civilization. The arts and philosophy of the 
Asiatic coast were easily carried across the sea, and 
there was Cimon, as I have said, with his ample for- 
tune, ready to receive them with due honours. Not 
content with patronizing their professors, he built the 
first of those noble porticos, of which we hear so much 
in Athens, and he formed the groves, which in process 
of time became the celebrated Academy. Planting is 
one of the most graceful, as in Athens it was one of 
the most beneficent, of employments. Cimon took in 
hand the wild wood, pruned and dressed it, and laid 
it out with handsome walks and welcome fountains. 
Nor, while hospitable to the authors of the city's civ- 
ilization, was he ungrateful to the instruments of her 
prosperity. His trees extended their cool, umbrageous 
branches over the merchants, who assembled in the 
Agora, for many generations. 

Those merchants certainly had deserved that act of 
bounty ; for all the while their ships had been carry- 
ing forth the intellectual fame of Athens to the West- 
ern World. Then commenced what may be called her 
University existence. Pericles, who succeeded Cimon 
both in the government and in the patronage of art, 
is said by Plutarch to have entertained the idea of 
making Athens the capital of federated Greece : in 
this he f ailed^ but his encouragement of such men as 



THE SITE OF A UNIVERSITY 15 

Phidias and Anaxagoras led the way to her acquir- 
ing a far more lasting sovereignty over a far wider 
empire. Little understanding the sources of her own 
greatness, Athens would go to war : peace is the in- 
terest of a seat of commerce and the arts ; but to war 
she went ; yet to her, whether peace or war, it mat- 
tered not. The political power of Athens waned and 
disappeared ; kingdoms rose and fell ; centuries rolled 
away, — they did but bring fresh triumphs to the city 
of the poet and the sage. There at length the swarthy 
Moor and Spaniard were seen to meet the blue-eyed 
Gaul ; and the Cappadocian, late subject of Mithri- 
dates, gazed without alarm at the haughty conquering 
Roman. Revolution after revolution passed over the 
face of Europe, as well as of Greece, but still she was 
there, — Athens, the city of mind, — as radiant, as 
splendid, as delicate, as young, as ever she had been. 
Many a more fruitful coast or isle is washed by the 
blue JEgean, many a spot is there more beautiful or 
sublime to see, many a territory more ample ; but 
there was one charm in Attica, which in the same per- 
fection was nowhere else. The deep pastures of Ar- 
cadia, the plain of Argos, the Thessalian vale, these 
had not the gift ; Boeotia, which lay to its immediate 
north, was notorious for its very want of it. The heavy 
atmosphere of that Boeotia might be good for vegeta- 
tion, but it was associated in popular belief with the 
dulness of the Boeotian intellect : on the contrary, the 
special purity, elasticity, clearness, and salubrity of 
the air of Attica, fit concomitant and emblem of its 
genius, did that for it which earth did not ; — it 
brought out every bright hue and tender shade of the 
landscape over which it was spread, and would have 



16 THE SITE OF A UNIVERSITY 

illuminated the face even of a more bare and rugged 
country. 

A confined triangle, perhaps fifty miles its greatest 
length, and thirty its greatest breadth ; two elevated 
rocky barriers, meeting at an angle ; three promi- 
nent mountains, commanding the plain, — Parnes, Pen- 
telicus, and Hymettus ; an unsatisfactory soil ; some 
streams, not always full ; — such is about the report 
which the agent of a London company would have 
made of Attica. He would report that the climate was 
mild ; the hills were limestone ; there was plenty of 
good marble ; more pasture land than at first survey 
might have been expected, sufficient certainly for sheep 
and goats ; fisheries productive ; silver mines once, but 
long since worked out ; figs fair ; oil first-rate ; olives 
in profusion. But what he would not think of noting 
down, was, that that olive tree was so choice in nature 
and so noble in shape, that it excited a religious ven- 
eration ; and that it took so kindly to the light soil, as 
to expand into woods upon the open plain, and to 
climb up and fringe the hills. He would not think of 
writing word to his employers, how that clear air, of 
which I have spoken, brought out, yet blended and 
subdued, the colours on the marble, till they had a 
softness and harmony, for all their richness, which in 
a picture looks exaggerated, yet is after all within the 
truth. He would not tell, how that same delicate and 
brilliant atmosphere freshened up the pale olive, till 
the olive forgot its monotony, and its cheek glowed 
like the arbutus or beech of the Umbrian hills. He 
would say nothing of the thyme and thousand fra- 
grant herbs which carpeted Hymettus ; he would hear 
nothing of the hum of its bees ; nor take much account 



THE SITE OF A UNIVERSITY 17 

of the rare flavour of its honey, since Gozo and 
Minorca were sufficient for the English demand. He 
would look over the iEgean from the height he had 
ascended ; he would follow with his eye the chain of 
islands, which, starting from the Sunian headland, 
seemed to offer the fabled divinities of Attica, when 
they would visit their Ionian cousins, a sort of via- 
duct thereto across the sea : but that fancy would not 
occur to him, nor any admiration of the dark violet 
billows with their white edges down below ; nor of 
those graceful, fan-like jets of silver upon the rocks, 
which slowly rise aloft like water spirits from the 
deep, then shiver, and break, and spread, and shroud 
themselves, and disappear, in a soft mist of foam ; nor 
of the gentle, incessant heaving and panting oi the 
whole liquid plain; nor of the long waves, keeping 
steady time, like a line of soldiery, as they resound 
upon the hollow shore, — he would not deign to notice 
that restless living element at all, except to bless his 
stars that he was not upon it. Nor the distinct de- 
tail, nor the refined colouring, nor the graceful out- 
line and roseate golden hue of the jutting crags, nor 
the bold shadows cast from Otus or Laurium by the 
declining sun ; — our agent of a mercantile firm would 
not value these matters even at a low figure. Rather 
we must turn for the sympathy we seek to yon pil- 
grim student come from a semi-barbarous land to that 
small corner of the earth, as to a shrine, where he 
might take his fill of gazing on those emblems and 
coruscations of invisible unoriginate perfection. It was 
the stranger from a remote province, from Britain or 
from Mauritania, who in a scene so different from that 
of his chilly, woody swamps, or of his fiery choking 



18 THE SITE OF A UNIVERSITY 

sands, learned at once what a real University must be, 
by coming to understand the sort of country, which 
was its suitable home. 

Nor was this all that a University required, and found 
in Athens. No one, even there, could live on poetry. 
If the students at that famous place had nothing bet- 
ter than bright hues and soothing sounds, they would 
not have been able or disposed to turn their residence 
there to much account. Of course they must have the 
means of living, nay, in a certain sense, of enjoyment, 
if Athens was to be an Alma Mater at the time, or to 
remain afterwards a pleasant thought in their memory. 
And so they had ; be it recollected Athens was a port, 
and a mart of trade, perhaps the first in Greece ; and 
this was very much to the point, when a number of 
strangers were ever flocking to it, whose combat was to 
be with intellectual, not physical difficulties, and who 
claimed to have their bodily wants supplied, that they 
might be at leisure to set about furnishing their minds. 
Now, barren as was the soil of Attica, and bare the 
face of the country, yet it had only too many resources 
for an elegant, nay luxurious abode there. So abundant 
were the imports of the place, that it was a common 
saying, that the productions, which were found singly 
elsewhere, were brought all together in Athens. Corn 
and wine, the staple of subsistence in such a climate, 
came from the isles of the ^gean ; fine wool and car- 
peting from Asia Minor; slaves, as now, from the 
Euxine, and timber too ; and iron and brass from the 
coasts of the Mediterranean. The Athenian did not 
condescend to manufactures himself, but encouraged 
them in others ; and a population of foreigners caught 
at the lucrative occupation both for home consumption 



THE SITE OF A UNIVERSITY 19 

and for exportation. Their cloth, and other textures for 
dress and furniture, and their hardware — for instance, 
armour — were in great request. Labour was cheap ; 
stone and marble in plenty ; and the taste and skill, 
which at first were devoted to public buildings, as 
temples and porticos, were in course of time applied 
to the mansions of public men. If nature did much for 
Athens, it is undeniable that art did much more. 



DEFINITION OF A LIBERAL EDUCATION* 

Tehngs, which can bear to be cut off from every 
thing else and yet persist in living, must have life in 
themselves ; pursuits, which issue in nothing, and still 
maintain their ground for ages, which are regarded as 
admirable, though they have not as yet proved them- 
selves to be useful, must have their sufficient end in 
themselves, whatever it turn out to be. And we are 
brought to the same conclusion by considering the 
force of the epithet, by which the knowledge under 
consideration is popularly designated. It is common 
to speak of " liberal knowledge," of the " liberal arts 
and studies," and of a " liberal education," as the es- 
pecial characteristic or property of a University and 
of a gentleman ; what is really meant by the word ? 
Now, first, in its grammatical sense it is opposed to 
servile; and by " servile work " is understood, as our 
catechisms inform us, bodily labour, mechanical em- 
ployment, and the like, in which the mind has little or 
no part. Parallel to such servile works are those arts, 
if they deserve the name, of which the poet speaks,^ 
which owe their origin and their method to hazard, not 
to skill ; as, for instance, the practice and operations of 
an empiric. As far as this contrast may be considered 

1 From " Idea of a University," Discourse v. University 

Teaching. 

2 TexvTj rlxw <lffrtp^e Kal rixv f^X^W- 

Vide Arist. Nic. Ethic, vi. 



DEFINITION OF A LIBERAL EDUCATION 21 

as a guide into the meaning of the word, liberal educa- 
tion and liberal pursuits are exercises of mind, of rea- 
son, of reflection. 

But we want something more for its explanation, for 
there are bodily exercises which are liberal, and mental 
exercises which are not so. For instance, in ancient 
times the practitioners in medicine were commonly 
slaves ; yet it was an art as intellectual in its nature, 
in spite of the pretence, fraud, and quackery with which 
it might then, as now, be debased, as it was heavenly 
in its aim. And so in like manner, we contrast a lib- 
eral education with a commercial education or a pro- 
fessional ; yet no one can deny that commerce and the 
professions afford scope for the highest and most 
diversified powers of mind. There is then a gr^t va- 
riety of intellectual exercises, which are not techni- 
cally called " liberal " ; on the other hand, I say, there 
are exercises of the body which do receive that appel- 
lation. Such, for instance, was the palaestra, in ancient 
times ; such the Olympic games, in which strength and 
dexterity of body as well as of mind gained the prize. 
In Xenophon we read of the young Persian nobility 
being taught to ride on horseback, and to speak the 
truth ; both being among the accomplishments of a 
gentleman. War, too, however rough a profession, has 
ever been accounted liberal, unless in cases when it 
becomes heroic, which would introduce us to another 
subject. 

Now comparing these instances together, we shall 
have no difficulty in determining the principle of this 
apparent variation in the apphcation of the term which 
I am examining. Manly games, or games of skill, or 
military prowess, though bodily, are, it seems, accounted 



22 DEFINITION OF A LIBERAL EDUCATION 

liberal ; on the other hand, what is merely professional, 
though highly intellectual, nay, though liberal in com- 
parison of trade and manual labour, is not simply called 
liberal, and mercantile occupations are not liberal at 
all. Why this distinction ?*because that alone is liberal 
knowledge, which stands on its own pretensions, which 
is independent of sequel, expects no complement, re- 
fuses to be informed (as it is called) by any end, or 
absorbed into any art, in order duly to present itself 
to our contemplation.' The most ordinary pursuits 
have this specific character, if they are self-sufficient 
and complete ; the highest lose it, when they minister 
to something beyond them. It is absurd to balance, in 
point of worth and importance, a treatise on reducing 
fractures with a game of cricket or a fox-chase ; yet 
of the two the bodily exercise has that quality which 
we call " liberal," and the intellectual has it not. And 
so of the learned professions altogether, considered 
merely as professions ; although one of them be the 
most popularly beneficial, and another the most politi- 
cally important, and the third the most intimately di- 
vine of all human pursuits, yet the very greatness of 
their end, the health of the body, or of the common- 
wealth, or of the soul, diminishes, not increases, their 
claim to the appellation " liberal," and that still more, 
if they are cut down to the strict exigencies of that 
end. If, for instance. Theology, instead of being culti- 
vated as a contemplation, be limited to the purposes 
of the pulpit or be represented by the catechism, it 
loses, — not its usefulness, not its divine character, not 
its meritoriousness (rather it gains a claim upon these 
titles by such charitable condescension), — but it does 
lose the particular attribute which I am illustrating ; 



DEFINITION OF A LIBERAL EDUCATION 23 

just as a face worn by tears and fasting loses its beauty, 
or a labourer's hand loses its delicateness ; — for 
Theology thus exercised is not simple knowledge, but 
rather is an art or a business making use of Theology. 
— ^And thus it appears that even what is supernatural 
need not be liberal, nor need a hero be a gentleman, 
for the plain reason that one idea is not another idea. 
And in like manner the Baconian Philosophy, by 
using its physical sciences in the service of man, does 
thereby transfer them from the order of Liberal Pur- 
suits to, I do not say the inferior, but the distinct 
class of the Useful. And, to take a different instauce, 
hence again, as is evident, whenever personal gain is 
the motive, still more distinctive an effect has it upon 
the character of a given pursuit ; thus racing, Vhich 
was a liberal exercise in Greece, forfeits its rank in 
times like these, so far as it is made the occasion of 
gambling. 

x'^U that I have been now saying is summed up in 
a few characteristic words of the great Philosopher. 
"Of possessions," he says, "those rather are useful, 
which bear fruit ; those liberal, which tend to enjoy- 
ment. By fruitful, I mean, which yield revenue ; by 
enjoyable, where nothing accrues of consequence be- 
yond the using''' ^ 

y^ Aristot. Rhet. 1, v. 



KNOWLEDGE VIEWED IN RELATION TO 
LEARNING ^ 

It were well if tlie English, like the Greek lan- 
guage, possessed some definite word to express, simply 
and generally, intellectual proficiency or perfection, 
such as " health," as used with reference to the ani- 
mal frame, and " virtue," with reference to our moral 
nature. I am not able to find such a term ; — talent, 
ability, genius, belong distinctly to the raw material, 
which is the subject-matter, not to that excellence 
which is the result of exercise and training. When we 
turn, indeed, to the particular kinds of intellectual 
perfection, words are forthcoming for our purpose, as, 
for instance, judgment, taste, and skill ; yet even these 
belong, for the most part, to powers or habits bear- 
ing upon practice or upon art, and not to any perfect 
condition of the intellect, considered in itself. Wisdom, 
again, is certainly a more comprehensive word than 
any other, but it has a direct relation to conduct and 
to human life. Knowledge, indeed, and Science ex- 
press purely intellectual ideas, but still not a state or 
quality of the intellect ; for knowledge, in its ordinary 
sense, is but one of its circumstances, denoting a pos- 
session or a habit ; and science has been appropriated 
to the subject-matter of the intellect, instead of be- 
longing in English, as it ought to do, to the intellect 

1 From "Idea of a University," Discourse vi, University 
Teaching. 



KNOWLEDGE IN RELATION TO LEARNING 25 

itself. The consequence is that, on an occasion like 
this, many words are necessary, in order, first, to bring 
out and convey what surely is no difficult idea in it- 
self, — that of the cultivation of the intellect as an 
end ; next, in order to recommend what surely is no 
unreasonable object ; and lastly, to describe and make 
the mind realize the particular perfection in which that 
object consists. Every one knows practically what are 
the constituents of health or of virtue ; and every one 
recognizes health and virtue as ends to be pursued ; it 
is otherwise with intellectual excellence, and this must 
be my excuse, if I seem to any one to be bestowing a 
good deal of labour on a preliminary matter. 

In default of a recognized term, I have called the 
perfection or virtue of the intellect by the nihne of 
philosophy, philosophical knowledge, enlargement of 
mind, or illumination ; terms which are not uncom- 
monly given to it by writers of this day ; but, whatever 
name we bestow on it, it is, I believe, as a matter of 
history, the business of a University to make this 
intellectual culture its direct scope, or to employ itself 
in the education of the intellect, — just as the work of 
a Hospital lies in healing the sick or wounded, of a 
Riding or Fencing School, or of a Gymnasium, in 
exercising the limbs, of an Almshouse, in aiding and 
solacing the old, of an Orphanage, in protecting inno- 
cence, of a Penitentiary, in restoring the guilty. I say, 
a University, taken in its bare idea, and before we 
view it as an instrument of the Church, has this object 
and this mission ; it contemplates neither moral im- 
pression nor mechanical production ; it professes to 
exercise the mind neither in art nor in duty ; its func- 
tion is intellectual culture ; here it may leave its schol- 



n( 



26 KNOWLEDGE IN RELATION TO LEARNING 

ars, and it has done its work when it has done as much 
\ as this. It educates the intellect to reason well in all 
! matters, to reach out towards truth, and to grasp it. 



This, I said in my foregoing Discourse, was the ob- 
ject of a University, viewed in itself, and apart from 
the Catholic Church, or from the State, or from any 
other power which may use it ; and I illustrated this in 
various ways. I said that the intellect must have an 
excellence of its own, for there was nothing which had 
not its specific good ; that the word " educate" would 
not be used of intellectual culture, as it is used, had 
not the intellect had an end of its own ; that, had it 
not such an end, there would be no meaning in call- 
ing certain intellectual exercises " liberal," in contrast 
with " useful," as is commonly done ; that the very 
notion of a philosophical temper implied it, for it 
threw us back upon research and system as ends in 
themselves, distinct from effects and works of any 
kind ; that a philosophical scheme of knowledge, or 
system of sciences, could not, from the nature of the 
case, issue in any one definite art or pursuit, as its 
end ; and that, on the other hand, the discovery and 
contemplation of truth, to which research and sys- 
tematizing led, were surely sufficient ends, though 
nothing beyond them were added, and that they had 
/ ever been accounted sufficient by mankind. 

Here then I take up the subject ; and, having de- 
termined that the cultivation of the intellect is an 
end distinct and sufficient in itself, and that, so far 
as words go it is an enlargement or illumination, I 
proceed to inquire what this mental breadth, or power, 
or light, or philosophy consists in. A Hospital heals 



KNOWLEDGE IN RELATION TO LEARNING 27 

a broken limb or cures a fever : what does an Institu- 
tion effect, which professes the health, not of the 
body, not of the soul, but of the intellect? What is 
this good, which in former times, as well as our own, 
has been found worth the notice, the appropriation, 
of the Catholic Church? 

I have then to investigate, in the Discourses which 
follow, those qualities and characteristics of the intel- 
lect in which its cultivation issues or rather consists ; 
and, with a view of assisting myself in this undertak- 
ing, I shall recur to certain questions which have al- 
ready been touched upon. These questions are three : 
viz. the relation of intellectual culture, first, to mere 
knowledge; secondly, to professional knowledge; and 
thirdly, to religious knowledge. In other worc^, are 
acquirements and attainments the scope of a Univer- 
sity Education ? or expertness in particular arts and 
pursuits? or moral and religious proficiency? or 
something besides these three? These questions I 
shall examine in succession, with the purpose I have 
mentioned ; and I hope to be excused, if, in this anx- 
ious undertaking, I am led to repeat what, either in 
these Discourses or elsewhere, I have already put 
upon paper. And first, of Mere Knowledge^ or Learn- 
ing, and its connexion with intellectual illumination 
or Philosophy. 

I suppose the prima-facie view which the public at 
large would take of a University, considering it as a 
place of Education, is nothing more or less than a 
place for acquiring a great deal of knowledge on a great 
many subjects. Memory is one of the first developed 
of the mental faculties ; a boy's business when he goes 



28 KNOWLEDGE IN RELATION TO LEARNING 

to school is to learn, that is, to store up things in his 
memory. For some years his intellect is little more 
than an instrument for taking in facts, or a receptacle 
for storing them ; he welcomes them as fast as they 
come to him ; he lives on what is without ; he has his 
eyes ever about him ; he has a lively susceptibility of 
impressions ; he imbibes information of every kind ; 
and little does he make his own in a true sense of the 
word, living rather upon his neighbours all around 
him. He has opinions, religious, political, and literary, 
and, for a boy, is very positive in them and sure about 
them ; but he gets them from his schoolfellows, or his 
masters, or his parents, as the case may be. Such as 
he is in his other relations, such also is he in his school 
exercises ; his mind is observant, sharp, ready, reten- 
tive ; he is almost passive in the acquisition of know- 
ledge. I say this in no disparagement of the idea of a 
clever boy. Geography, chronology, history, language, 
natural history, he heaps up the matter of these studies 
as treasures for a future day. It is the seven years of 
plenty with him : he gathers in by handfuls, like the 
Egyptians, without counting ; and though, as time goes 
on, there is exercise for his argumentative powers in 
the Elements of Mathematics, and for his taste in the 
Poets and Orators, still, while at school, or at least, 
till quite the last years of his time, he acquires, and 
little more ; and when he is leaving for the University, 
he is mainly the creature of foreign influences and cir- 
cumstances, and made up of accidents, homogeneous 
or not, as the case may be. Moreover, the moral hab- 
its, which are a boy's praise, encourage and assist this 
result ; that is, diligence, assiduity, regularity, despatch, 
persevering application ; for these are the direct condi- 



KNOWLEDGE IN RELATION TO LEARNING 29 

tions of acquisition, and naturally lead to it. Acquire- 
ments, again, are emphatically producible, and at a 
moment ; they are a something to show, both for mas- 
ter and scholar; an audience, even though ignorant 
themselves of the subjects of an examination, can com- 
prehend when questions are answered and when they 
are not. Here again is a reason why mental culture is 
in the minds of men identified with the acquisition of 
knowledge. 

The same notion possesses the public mind, when it 
passes on from the thought of a school to that of a 
University : and with the best of reasons so far as this, 
that there is no true culture without acquirements, and 
that philosophy presupposes knowledge. It requires a 
great deal of reading, or a wide range of information, 
to warrant us in putting forth our opinions on any 
serious subject ; and without such learning the most 
original mind may be able indeed to dazzle, to amuse, 
to refute, to perplex, but not to come to any useful 
result or any trustworthy conclusion. There are indeed 
persons who profess a different view of the matter, 
and even act upon it. Every now and then you will 
find a person of vigorous or fertile mind, who relies 
upon his own resources, despises all former authors, 
and gives the world, with the utmost fearlessness, his 
views upon religion, or history, or any other popular 
subject. And his works may sell for a while ; he may 
get a name in his day ; but this will be all. His read- 
ers are sure to find in the long run that his doctrines 
are mere theories, and not the expression of facts, that 
they are chaff instead of bread, and then his popular- 
ity drops as suddenly as it rose. 

Knowledge then is the indispensable condition of 



30 KNOWLEDGE IN EELATION TO LEARNING 

expansion of mind, and the instrument of attaining to 
it ; this cannot be denied, it is ever to he insisted on ; 
I begin with it as a first principle ; however, the very 
truth of it carries men too far, and confirms to them 
the notion that it is the whole of the matter. A nar- 
row mind is thought to be that which contains little 
knowledge ; and an enlarged mind, that which holds a 
great deal ; and wliat seems to put the matter beyond 
dispute is, the fact of the great number of studies 
which are pursued in a University, by its very profes- 
sion. Lectures are given on every kind of subject ; 
examinations are held ; prizes awarded. There are 
moral, metaphysical, physical Professors; Professors 
of languages, of history, of mathematics, of experi- 
mental science. Lists of questions are published, won- 
derful for their range and depth, variety and difficulty ; 
treatises are written, which carry upon their very face 
the evidence of extensive reading or multifarious in- 
formation ; what then is wanting for mental culture to 
a person of large reading and scientific attainments ? 
what is grasp of mind but acquirement? where shall 
philosophical repose be found, but in the consciousness 
and enjoyment of large intellectual possessions ? 

And yet this notion is, I conceive, a mistake, and 
my present business is to show that it is one, and that 
the end of a Liberal Education is not mere knowledge, 
or knowledge considered in its matter ; and I shall 
best attain my object, by actually setting, down some 
cases, which will be generally granted to be instances 
of the process of enlightenment or enlargement of 
mind, and others which are not, and thus, by the com- 
parison, you will be able to judge for yourselves, Gentle- 
men, whether Knowledge, that is, acquirement, is after 



KNOWLEDGE IN RELATION TO LEARNING 31 

all the real principle of the enlargement, or whether 
that principle is not rather something beyond it. 

For instance,^ let a person, whose experience has 
hitherto been confined to the more calm and unpre- 
tending scenery of these islands, whether here or in 
England, go for the first time into parts where physi- 
cal nature puts on her wilder and more awful forms, 
whether at home or abroad, as into mountainous dis- 
tricts ; or let one, who has ever lived in a quiet village, 
go for the first time to a great metropolis, — then 1 
suppose he will have a sensation which perhaps he 
never had before. He has a feeling not in addition or 
increase of former feelings, but of something different 
in its nature. He will perhaps be borne forwarci^ and 
find for a time that he has lost his bearings. He has 
made a certain progress, and he has a consciousness of 
mental enlargement ; he does not stand where he did, 
he has a new centre, and a range of thoughts to which 
he was before a stranger. 

Again, the view of the heavens which the telescope 
opens upon us, if allowed to fill and possess the mind, 
may almost whirl it round and make it dizzy. It brings 
in a flood of ideas, and is rightly called an intellectual 
enlargement, whatever is meant by the term. 

And so again, the sight of beasts of prey and other 
foreign animals, their strangeness, the originality (if I 
may use the term) of their forms and gestures and 
habits and their variety and independence of each 
other, throw us out of ourselves into another creation, 

^ The pages which follow are taken almost verbatim from the 
author's 14th (Oxford) University Sermon, which, at the time 
of writing this Discourse, he did not expect ever to reprint. 



32 KNOWLEDGE IN RELATION TO LEARNING 

and as if under another Creator, if I may so express 
the temptation which may come on the mind. We seem 
to have new faculties, or a new exercise for our facul- 
ties, by this addition to our knowledge; like a pris- 
oner, who, having been accustomed to wear manacles 
or fetters, suddenly finds his arms and legs free. 

Hence Physical Science generally, in all its depart- 
ments, as bringing before us the exuberant riches and 
resources, yet the orderly course, of the Universe, ele- 
vates and excites the student, and at first, I may say, 
almost takes away his breath, while in time it exer- 
cises a tranquillizing influence upon him. 

Again, the study of history is said to enlarge and 
enlighten the mind, and why ? because, as I conceive, 
it gives it a power of judging of passing events, and 
of all events, and a conscious superiority over them, 
which before it did not possess. 

And in like manner, what is called seeing the world, 
entering into active life, going into societj^, travelling, 
gaining acquaintance with the various classes of the 
community, coming into contact with the principles 
and modes of thought of various parties, interests, and 
races, their views, aims, habits and manners, their 
religious creeds and forms of worship, — gaining ex- 
perience how various yet how alike men are, how low- 
minded, how bad, how opposed, yet how confident in 
their opinions ; all this exerts a perceptible influence 
upon the mind, which it is impossible to mistake, be 
it good or be it bad, and is popularly called its en- 
largement. 

And then again, the first time the mind comes 
across the arguments and speculations of unbelievers, 
and feels what a novel light they cast upon what he 



KNOWLEDGE IN RELATION TO LEARNING 33 

has hitherto accounted sacred ; and still more, if it 
gives in to them and embraces them, and throws off 
as so much prejudice what it has hitherto held, and, 
as if waking from a dream, begins to realize to its im- 
agination that there is now no such thing as law and 
the transgression of law, that sin is a phantom, and 
punishment a bugbear, that it is free to sin, free to 
enjoy the world and the flesh ; and still further, when 
it does enjoy them, and reflects that it may think and 
hold just what it will, that " the world is all before it 
where to choose," and what system to build up as its 
own private persuasion ; when this torrent of wilful 
thoughts rushes over and inundates it, who will deny 
that the fruit of the tree of knowledge, or what the 
mind takes for knowledge, has made it one of th^ods, 
with a sense of expansion and elevation, — an intoxi- 
cation in reality, still, so far as the subjective state of 
the mind goes, an illumination ? Hence the fanaticism 
of individuals or nations, who suddenly cast off their 
Maker. Their eyes are opened ; and, like the judg- 
ment-stricken king in the Tragedy, they see two suns, 
and a magic universe, out of which they look back 
upon their former state of faith and innocence with a 
sort of contempt and indignation, as if they were then 
but fools, and the dupes of imposture. 

On the other hand. Religion has its own enlarge- 
ment, and an enlargement, not of tumult, but of 
peace. It is often remarked of uneducated persons, 
who have hitherto thought little of the unseen world, 
that, on their turning to God, looking into themselves, 
regulating their hearts, reforming their conduct, and 
meditating on death and judgment, heaven and hell, 
they seem to become, in point of intellect, different 



34 KNOWLEDGE IN RELATION TO LEARNING 

beings from what they were. Before, they took things 
as they came, and thought no more of one thing than 
another. But now every event has a meaning ; they 
have their own estimate of whatever happens to them ; 
they are mindful of times and seasons, and compare 
the present with the past ; and the world, no longer 
dull, monotonous, unprofitable, and hopeless, is a vari- 
ous and complicated drama, with parts and an object, 
and an awful moral. 

Now from these instances, to which many more 
might be added, it is plain, first, that the communica- 
tion of knowledge certainly is either a condition or the 
means of that sense of enlargement or enlightenment, 
of which at this day we hear so much in certain quar- 
ters : this cannot be denied ; but next, it is equally 
plain, that such communication is not the whole of the 
process. The enlargement consists, not merely in the 
passive reception into the mind of a number of ideas 
hitherto unknown to it, but in the mind's energetic 
and simultaneous action upon and towards and among 
those new ideas, which are rushing in upon it. It is 
the action of a formative power, reducing to order 
and meaning the matter of our acquirements; it is 
a making the objects of our knowledge subjectively 
our own, or, to use a familiar word, it is a digestion of 
what we receive, into the substance of our previous 
state of thought ; and without this no enlargement is 
said to follow. IThere is no enlargement, unless there 
be a comparison of ideas one with another, as they 
come before the mind, and a systematizing of them, i 
We feel our minds to be growing and expanding then^ 
when we not only learn, but refer what we learn to 



KNOWLEDGE IN RELATION TO LEARNING 35 

what we know already. It is not the mere addition 
to our knowledge that is the illumination ; but the 
locomotion, the movement onwards, of that mental 
centre, to which both what we know, and what we are 
learning, the accumulating mass of our acquirements, 
gravitates. And therefore a truly great intellect, and 
recognized to be such by the common opinion of 
mankind, such as the intellect of Aristotle, or of St. 
Thomas, or of Newton, or of Goethe, (I purposely 
take instances within and without the Catholic pale, 
when I would speak of the intellect as such,) is one 
which takes a connected view of old and new, past 
and present, far and near, and which has an insight 
into the influence of all these one on another ; without 
which there is no whole, and no centre. It possesses 
the knowledge, not only of things, but also of their 
mutual and true relations ; knowledge, not merely con- 
sidered as acquirement, bat as philosophy. 

Accordingly, when this analytical, distributive, har- 
monizing process is away, the mind experiences no 
enlargement, and is not reckoned as enlightened or 
comprehensive, whatever it may add to its knowledge. 
For instance, a great memory, as I have already said, 
does not make a philosopher, any more than a diction- 
ary can be called a grammar. There are men who 
embrace in their minds a vast multitude of ideas, 
but with little sensibility about their real relations 
towards each other. These may be antiquarians, an- 
nalists, naturalists ; they may be learned in the law ; 
they may be versed in statistics ; they are most useful 
in their own place ; I should shrink from speaking 
disrespectfully of them ; still, there is nothing in such 
attainments to guarantee the absence of narrowness of 



36 KNOWLEDGE IN RELATION TO LEARNING 

mind. If they are nothing more than well-read men, 
or men of information, they have not what specially 
deserves the name of culture of mind, or fulfils the 
tjrpe of Liberal Education. 

In like manner, we sometimes fall in with persons 
who have seen much of the world, and of the men who, 
in their day, have played a conspicuous part in it, 
but who generalize nothing, and have no observation, 
in the true sense of the word. They abound in in- 
formation in detail, curious and entertaining, about 
men and things ; and, having lived under the influence 
of no very clear or settled principles, religious or po- 
litical, they speak of every one and every thing, only 
as so many phenomena, which are complete in them- 
selves, and lead to nothing, not discussing them, or 
teaching any truth, or instructing the hearer, but 
simply talking. No one would say that these persons, 
well informed as they are, had attained to any great 
culture of intellect or to philosophy. 

The case is the same still more strikingly where 
the persons in question are beyond dispute men of in- 
ferior powers and deficient education. Perhaps they 
have been much in foreign countries, and they receive, 
in a passive, otiose, unfruitful way, the various facts 
which are forced upon them there. Seafaring men, for 
example, range from one end of the earth to the other ; 
but the multiplicity of external objects, which they 
have encountered, forms no symmetrical and consistent 
picture upon their imagination ; they see the tapestry 
of human life, as it were on the wrong side, and it tells 
no story. They sleep, and they rise up, and they find 
themselves, now in Europe, now in Asia ; they see 
visions of great cities and wild regions ; they are in the 



KNOWLEDGE IN RELATION TO LEARNING 37 

marts of commerce, or amid the islands of the South ; 
they gaze on Pompey's Pillar, or on the Andes ; and 
nothing which meets them carries them forward or 
backward, to any idea beyond itself. Nothing has a 
drift or relation ; nothing has a history or a promise. 
Every thing stands by itself, and comes and goes in its 
turn, like the shifting scenes of a show, which leave 
the spectator where he was. Perhaps you are near 
such a man on a particular occasion, and expect him 
to be shocked or perplexed at something which occurs ; 
but one thing is much the same to him as another, or, 
if he is perplexed, it is as not knowing what to say, 
whether it is right to admire, or to ridicule, or to dis- 
approve, while conscious that some expression of opin- 
ion is expected from him ; for in fact he has i^ stand- 
ard of judgment at all, and no landmarks to guide 
him to a conclusion. Such is mere acquisition, and, I 
repeat, no one would dream of calling it philosophy. 

Instances, such as these, confirm, by the contrast, the 
conclusion I have already drawn from those which pre- 
ceded them. That only is true enlargement of mind 
which is the power of viewing many things at once as 
one whole, of referring them severally to their true place 
in the universal system, of understanding their respec- 
tive values, and determining their mutual dependence. 
Thus is that form of Universal Knowledge, of which I 
have on a former occasion spoken, set up in the indi- 
vidual intellect, and constitutes its perfection. Pos- 
sessed of this real illumination, the mind never views 
any part of the extended subject-matter of Knowledge 
without recollecting that it is but a part, or without the 
associations which spring from this recollection. It 



38 KNOWLEDGE IN RELATION TO LEARNING 

makes every thing in some sort lead to every thing 
else ; it would communicate the image of the whole to 
every separate portion, till that whole becomes in 
imagination like a spirit, every where pervading and 
penetrating its component parts, and giving them one 
definite meaning. Just as our bodily organs, when 
mentioned, recall their function in the body, as the 
word " creation " suggests the Creator, and " subjects " 
a sovereign, so, in the mind of the Philosopher, as we 
are abstractedly conceiving of him, the elements of 
the physical and moral world, sciences, arts, pursuits, 
ranks, offices, events, opinions, individualities, are all 
viewed as one, with correlative functions, and as 
gradually by successive combinations converging, one 
and all, to the true centre. 

■* To have even a portion of this illuminative reason 
and true philosophy is the highest state to which na- 
ture can aspire, in the way of intellect ; it puts the 
mind above the influences of chance and necessity,* 
above anxiety, suspense, unsettlement, and supersti- 
tion, which is the lot of the many. Men, whose minds 
are possessed with some one object, take exaggerated 
views of its importance, are feverish in the pursuit of 
it, make it the measure of things which are utterly 
foreign to it, and are startled and despond if it hap- 
pens to fail them. They are ever in alarm or in trans- 
port. Those, on the other hand, who have no object or 
principle whatever to hold by, lose their way, every 
step they take. They are thrown out, and do not 
know what to think or say, at every fresh juncture ; 
they have no view of persons, or occurrences, or facts, 
which come suddenly upon them, and they hang upon 
the opinion of others, for want of internal resources. 



KNOWLEDGE IN RELATION TO LEARNING 39 

But the intellect, which has been disciplined to the 
perfection of its powers, which knows, and thinks while 
it knows, which has learned to leaven the dense mass 
of facts and events with the elastic force of reason, 
such an intellect cannot be partial, cannot be exclusive, 
cannot be impetuous, cannot be at a loss, cannot but 
be patient, collected, and majestically calm, because it 
discerns the end in every beginning, the origin in every 
end, the law in every interruption, the limit in each 
delay ; because it ever knows where it stands, and how 
its path lies from one point to another. It is the re- 
Tpdycovo^ of the Peripatetic, and has the " nil admi- 
rari" of the Stoic, — 

Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas, 
Atque metus omnes, et inexorabile fatuin 
Subjecit pedibus, strepitumque Acherontis avari. 

There are men who, when in difficulties, originate at 
the moment vast ideas or dazzling projects ; who, under 
the influence of excitement, are able to cast a light, 
almost as if from inspiration, on a subject or course of 
action which comes before them ; who have a sudden 
presence of mind equal to any emergency, rising with 
the occasion, and an undaunted magnanimous bearing, 
and an energy and keenness which is but made intense 
by opposition. This is genius, this is heroism ; it is 
the exhibition of a natural gift, which no culture can 
teach, at which no Institution can aim ; here, on the 
contrary, we are concerned^ not with mere nature, but 
with training and teaching. That perfection of the In- 
tellect, which is the result of Education, and its heau 
ideal, to be imparted to individuals in their respective 
measures, is the clear, calm, accurate vision and com- 
prehension of all things, as far as the finite mind can 



40 KNOWLEDGE IN RELATION TO LEARNING 

embrace them, each in its place, and with its own char- 
acteristics upon it. It is almost prophetic from its 
knowledge of history; it is almost heart-searching 
from its knowledge ,of human nature ; it has almost 
supernatural charity from its freedom from littleness 
and prejudice ; it has almost the repose of faith, be- 
cause nothing can startle it ; it has almost the beauty 
and harmony of heavenly contemplation, so intimate 
is it with the eternal order of things and the music of 
the spheres. 

*And now, if I may take for granted that the true 
and adequate end of intellectual training and of a 
University is not Learning or Acquirement, but rather, 
is Thought or Reason exercised upon Knowledge, or 
what may be called Philosophy, I shall be in a posi- 
tion to explain the various mistakes which at the pres- 
ent day beset the subject of University Education/ 

I say then, if we would improve the intellect, first 
of all, we must ascend ; we cannot gain real know- 
ledge on a level; we must generalize, we must reduce 
to method, we must have a grasp of principles, and 
group and shape our acquisitions by means of them. 
It matters not whether our field of operation be wide 
or limited ; in every case, to command it, is to mount 
above it. Who has not felt the irritation of mind and 
impatience created by a deep, rich country, visited for 
the first time, with winding lanes, and high hedges, 
and green steeps, and tangled woods, and every thing 
smiling indeed, but in a maze? The same feeling 
comes upon us in a strange city, when we have no map 
of its streets. Hence you hear of practised travellers, 
when they first come into a place, mounting some high 



KNOWLEDGE IN RELATION TO LEARNING 41 

hill or church tower, by way of reconnoitring its neigh- 
bourhood. In like manner, you must be above your 
knowledge, not under it, or it will oppress you ; and 
the more you have of it, the greater will be the load. 
The learning of a Salmasius or a Burman, unless you 
are its master, will be your tyrant. " Imperat aut ser- 
vit ; " if you can wield it with a strong arm, it is a 
great weapon ; otherwise, 

Vis consili expers 
Mole ruit sua. 

You will be overwhelmed, like Tarpeia, by the heavy 
wealth which you have exacted from tributary gener- 
ations. 

Instances abound ; there are authors who are as 
pointless as they are inexhaustible in their literary 
resources. They measure knowledge by bulk, as it lies 
in the rude block, without symmetry, without design. 
How many commentators are there on the Classics, 
how many on Holy Scripture, from whom we rise up, 
wondering at the learning which has passed before us, 
and wondering why it passed ! How many writers are 
there of Ecclesiastical History, such as Mosheim or 
Du Pin, who, breaking up their subject into details, 
destroy its life, and defraud us of the whole by their 
anxiety about the parts ! The Sermons, again, of the 
English Divines in the seventeenth century, how often 
are they mere repertories of miscellaneous and of- 
ficious learning ! Of course Catholics also may read 
without thinking ; and in their case, equally as with 
Protestants, it holds good, that such knowledge is 
unworthy of the name, knowledge which they have not 
thought through, and thought out. Such readers are 



42 KNOWLEDGE IN RELATION TO LEARNING 

only possessed by their knowledge, not possessed of it ; 
nay, in matter of fact they are often even carried away 
by it, without any volition of their own. Recollect, 
the Memory can tyrannize, as well as the Imagination. 
Derangement, I believe, has been considered as a loss 
of control over the sequence of ideas. The mind, once 
set in motion, is henceforth deprived of the power of 
initiation, and becomes the victim of a train of asso- 
ciations, one thought suggesting another, in the way 
of cause and effect, as if by a mechanical process, or 
some physical necessity. No one, who has had expe- 
rience of men of studious habits, but must recognize 
the existence of a parallel phenomenon in the case of 
those who have over-stimulated the Memory. In such 
persons Reason acts almost as feebly and as impo- 
tently as in the madman; once fairly started on any 
subject whatever, they have no power of self-control ; 
they passively endure the succession of impulses which 
are evolved out of the original exciting cause ; they 
are passed on from one idea to another and go steadily 
forward, plodding along one line of thought in spite 
of the amplest concessions of the hearer, or wander- 
ing from it in endless digression in spite of his remon- 
strances. Now, if, as is very certain, no one would 
envy the madman the glow and originality of his con- 
ceptions, why must we extol the cultivation of that 
intellect, which is the prey, not indeed of barren fan- 
cies but of barren facts, of random intrusions from 
without, though not of morbid imaginations from 
within ? And in thus speaking, I am not denying that 
a strong and ready memory is in itself a real treasure ; 
I am not disparaging a well-stored mind, though it be 
nothing besides, provided it be sober, any more than 



KNOWLEDGE IN RELATION TO LEARNING 43 

I would despise a bookseller's shop : — it is of great 
value to others, even when not so to the owner. Nor 
am I banishing, far from it, the possessors of deep 
and multifarious learning from my ideal University ; 
they adorn it in the eyes of men ; I do but say that 
they constitute no type of the results at which it aims ; 
that it is no great gain to the intellect to have en- 
larged the memory at the expense of faculties which 
are indisputably higher. 

Nor, indeed, am I supposing that there is any great 
danger, at least in this day, of over-education ; the 
danger is on the other side. I will tell you. Gentle- 
men, what has been the practical error of the last 
twenty years, — not to load the memory of the student 
with a mass of undigested knowledge, but to force 
upon him so much that he has rejected all. It has been 
the error of distracting and enfeebling the mind by an 
unmeaning profusion of subjects ; of implying that a 
sipattering in a dozen branches of study is not shal- 
lowness, which it really is, but enlargement, which it is 
not; of considering an acquaintance with the learned 
names of things and persons, and the possession of 
clever duodecimos, and attendance on eloquent lec- 
turers, and membership with scientific institutions, 
and the sight of the experiments of a platform and the 
specimens of a museum, that all this was not dissipa- 
tion of mind, but progress. All things now are to be 
learned at once, not first one thing, then another, not 
one well, but many badly. Learning is to be with- 
out exertion, without attention, without toil; without 
grounding, without advance, without finishing. There 
is to be nothing individual in it ; and this, forsooth, is 



44 KNOWLEDGE IN RELATION TO LEARNING 

the wonder of the age. What the steam engine does 
with matter, the printing press is to do with mind; it 
is to act mechanically, and the population is to be pas- 
sively, almost unconsciously enlightened, by the mere 
multiplication and dissemination of volumes. Whether 
it be the school boy, or the school girl, or the youth at 
college, or the mechanic in the town, or the politician 
in the senate, all have been the victims in one way or 
other of this most preposterous and pernicious of de- 
lusions. Wise men have lifted up their voices in vain ; 
and at length, lest their own institutions should be 
outshone and should disappear in the folly of the hour, 
they have been obliged, as far as they could with a 
good conscience, to humour a spirit which they could 
not withstand, and make temporizing concessions at 
which they could not but inwardly smile. 

It must not be supposed that, because I so speak, 
therefore I have some sort of fear of the education of 
the people : on the contrary, the more education they 
have, the better, so that it is really education. Nor 
am I an enemy to the cheap publication of scientific 
and literary works, which is now in vogue : on the 
contrary, I consider it a great advantage, convenience, 
and gain ; that is, to those to whom education has 
given a capacity for using them. Further, I consider 
such innocent recreations as science and literature are 
able to furnish will be a very fit occupation of the 
thoughts and the leisure of young persons, and may be 
made the means of keeping them from bad employ- 
ments and bad companions. Moreover, as to that 
superficial acquaintance with chemistry, and geology, 
and astronomy, and political economy, and modern 
history, and biography, and other branches of know- 



KNOWLEDGE IN RELATION TO LEARNING 45 

ledge, which periodical literature and occasional lec- 
tures and scientific institutions diffuse through the 
community, I think it a graceful accomplishment, and 
a suitable, nay, in this day a necessary accomplish- 
ment, in the case of educated men. Nor, lastly, am I 
disparaging or discouraging the thorough acquisition 
of any one of these studies, or denying that, as far as 
it goes, such thorough acquisition is a real education 
of the mind. All I say is, call things by their right 
names, and do not confuse together ideas which are 
essentially different. A thorough knowledge of one 
science and a superficial acquaintance with many, are 
not the same thing ; a smattering of a hundred things 
or a memory for detail, is not a philosophical or com- 
prehensive view. Recreations are not educatiofci ; ac- 
complishments are not education. Do not say, the 
people must be educated, when, after all, you only 
mean, amused, refreshed, soothed, put into good spir- 
its and good humour, or kept from vicious excesses. 
I do not say that such amusements, such occupations 
of mind, are not a great gain ; but they are not educa- 
tion. You may as well call drawing and fencing edu- 
cation, as a general knowledge of botany or concho- 
logy. Stuffing birds or playing stringed instruments is 
an elegant pastime, and a resource to the idle, but it 
is not education ; it does not form or cultivate the in- 
tellect. Education is a high word ; it is the prepara- 
tion for knowledge, and it is the imparting of know- 
ledge in proportion to that preparation. We require 
intellectual eyes to know withal, as bodily eyes for 
sight. We need both objects and organs intellectual ; 
we cannot gain them without setting about it ; we 
cannot gain them in our sleep, or by hap-hazard. The 



46 KNOWLEDGE IN RELATION TO LEARNING 

best telescope does not dispense with eyes ; the print- 
ing press or the lecture room will assist us greatly, hut 
we must be true to ourselves, we must be parties in 
the work. A University is, according to the usual 
designation, an Alma Mater, knowing her children 
one by one, not a foundry, or a mint, or a treadmill. 

I protest to you. Gentlemen, that if I had to choose 
between a so-called University, which dispensed with 
residence and tutorial superintendence, and gave its 
degrees to any person who passed an examination in a 
wide range of subjects, and a University which had no 
professors or examinations at all, but merely brought 
a number of young men together for three or four 
years, and then sent them away as the University of 
Oxford is said to have done some sixty years since, if I 
were asked which of these two methods was the better 
discipline of the intellect, — mind, I do not say which 
is morally the better, for it is plain that compulsory 
study must be a good and idleness an intolerable mis- 
chief, — but if I must determine which of the two 
courses was the more successful in training, moulding, 
enlarging the mind, which sent out men the more fitted 
for their secular duties, which produced better public 
men, men of the world, men whose names would de- 
scend to posterity, I have no hesitation in giving the 
preference to that University which did nothing, over 
that which exacted of its members an acquaintance 
v/ith every science under the sun. And, paradox as 
this may seem, still if results be the test of systems, 
the influence of the public schools and colleges of Eng- 
land, in the course of the last century, at least will 
bear out one side of the contrast as I have drawn it. 



KNOWLEDGE IN RELATION TO LEARNING 47 

What would come, on the other hand, of the ideal 
systems of education which have fascinated the im- 
agination of this age, could they ever take effect, and 
whether they would not produce a generation frivo- 
lous, narrow-minded, and resourceless, intellectually 
considered, is a fair subject for debate; but so far is 
certain, that the Universities and scholastic establish- 
ments, to which I refer, and which did little more than 
bring together first boys and then youths in large 
numbers, these institutions, with miserable deformities 
on the side of morals, with a hollow profession of 
Christianity, and a heathen code of ethics, — I say, 
at least they can boast of a succession of heroes and 
statesmen, of literary men and philosophers, oi men 
conspicuous for great natural virtues, for habits of 
business, for knowledge of life, for practical judgment, 
for cultivated tastes, for accomplishments, who have 
made England what it is, — able to subdue the earth, 
able to dominate over Catholics. 

How is this to be explained ? I suppose as follows : 
When a multitude of young men, keen, open-hearted, 
sympathetic, and observant, as young men are, come 
together and freely mix with each other, they are sure 
to learn one from another, even if there be no one to 
teach them ; the conversation of all is a series of lec- 
tures to each, and they gain for themselves new ideas 
and views, fresh matter of thought, and distinct prin- 
ciples for judging and acting, day by day. An infant 
has to learn the meaning of the information which its 
senses convey to it, and this seems to be its employ- 
ment. It fancies all that the eye presents to it to be 
close to it, till it actually learns the contrary, and thus 
by practice does it ascertain the relations and uses of 



48 KNOWLEDGE IN RELATION TO LEARNING 

those first elements of knowledge which are necessary 
for its animal existence. A parallel teaching is neces- 
sary for our social being, and it is secured by a large 
school or a college ; and this effect may be fairly called 
in its own department an enlargement of mind. It is 
seeing the world on a small field with little trouble ; 
for the pupils or students come from very different 
places, and with widely different notions, and there is 
much to generalize, much to adjust, much to eliminate, 
there are inter-relations to be defined, and conven- 
tional rules to be established, in the process, by which 
the whole assemblage is moulded together, and gains 
one tone and one character. 

Let it be clearly understood, I repeat it, that I am 
not taking into account moral or religious consider- 
ations ; I am but saying that that youthful community 
will constitute a whole, it will embody a specific idea, 
it will represent a doctrine, it will administer a code 
of conduct, and it will furnish principles of thought 
and action. It will give birth to a living teaching, 
which in course of time will take the shape of a self- 
perpetuating tradition, or a genius loci, as it is some- 
times called ; which haunts the home where it has been 
born, and which imbues and forms, more or less, and 
one by one, every individual who is successively brouglit 
under its shadow. Thus it is that, independent of di- 
rect instruction on the part of Superiors, there is a 
sort of self-education in the academic institutions of 
Protestant England ; a characteristic tone of thought, 
a recognized standard of judgment is found in them, 
which, as developed in the individual who is submitted 
to it, becomes a twofold source of strength to him, 
both from the distinct stamp it impresses on his mind, 



KNOWLEDGE IN RELATION TO LEARNING 49 

and from the bond of union which it creates between 
him and others, — effects which are shared by the 
authorities of the place, for they themselves have been 
educated in it, and at all times are exposed to the in- 
fluence of its ethical atmosphere. Here then is a real 
teaching, whatever be its standards and principles, 
true or false ; and it at least tends towards cultivation 
of the intellect ; it at least recognizes that knowledge 
is something more than a sort of passive reception of 
scraps and details ; it is a something, and it does a 
something, which never will issue from the most stren- 
uous efforts of a set of teachers, with no mutual sym- 
pathies and no inter-communion, of a set of examiners 
with no opinions which they dare profess, and w^^h no 
common principles, who are teaching or questioning a 
set of youths who do not know them, and do not know 
each other, on a large number of subjects, different 
in kind, and connected by no wide philosophy, three 
times a week, or three times a year, or once in three 
years, in chill lecture-rooms or on a pompous anniver- 
sary. 

Nay, self-education in any shape, in the most re- 
stricted sense, is preferable to a system of teaching 
which, professing so much, really does so little for the 
mind. Shut your College gates against the votary of 
knowledge, throw him back upon the searchings and 
the efforts of his own mind ; he will gain by being 
spared an entrance into your Babel. Few, indeed, there 
are who can dispense with the stimulus and support of 
instructors, or will do any thing at all, if left to them- 
selves. A fewer still (though such great minds are to 
be found), who wiU not, from such unassisted attempts, 



50 KNOWLEDGE IN RELATION TO LEARNING 

contract a self-reliance and a self-esteem, which are 
not only moral evils, but serious hindrances to the 
attainment of truth. And next to none, perhaps, or 
none, who will not be reminded from time to time of 
the disadvantage under which they lie, by their imper- 
fect grounding, by the breaks, deficiencies, and ir- 
regularities of their knowledge, by the eccentricity of 
opinion and the confusion of principle which they ex- 
hibit. They will be too often ignorant of what every 
one knows and takes for granted, of that multitude 
of small truths which fall upon the mind like dust, 
impalpable and ever accumulating ; they may be un- 
able to converse, they may argue perversely, they 
may pride themselves on their worst paradoxes or their 
grossest truisms, they may be full of their own mode 
of viewing things, unwilling to be put out of their 
way, slow to enter into the minds of others ; — but, 
with these and whatever other liabilities upon their 
heads, they are likely to have more thought, more mind, 
more philosophy, more true enlargement, than those 
earnest but ill-used persons, who are forced to load 
their minds with a score of subjects against an ex- 
amination, who have too much on their hands to 
indulge themselves in thinking or investigation, who 
devour premiss and conclusion together with indis- 
criminate greediness, who hold whole sciences on faith, 
and commit demonstrations to memory, and who too 
often, as might be expected, when their period of edu- 
cation is passed, throw up all they have learned in dis- 
gust, having gained nothing really by their anxious 
labours, except perhaps the habit of application. 

Yet such is the better specimen of the fruit of that 
ambitious system which has of late years been making 



KNOWLEDGE IN RELATION TO LEARNING 51 

way among us : for its result on ordinary minds, and 
on the common run of students, is less satisfactory 
still ; they leave their place of education simply dis- 
sipated and relaxed by the multiplicity of subjects, 
which they have never really mastered, and so shallow 
as not even to know their shallowness. How much 
better, I say, is it for the active and thoughtful intel- 
lect, where such is to be found, to eschew the College 
and the University altogether, than to submit to drudg- 
ery so ignoble, a mockery so contumelious ! How much 
more profitable for the independent mind, after the 
mere rudiments of education, to range through a 
library at random, taking down books as they meet 
him, and pursuing the trains of thought whi^ his 
mother wit suggests ! How much healthier to wander 
into the fields, and there with the exiled Prince to 
find " tongues in the trees, books in the running 
brooks ! " How much more genuine an education is 
that of the poor boy in the Poem ^ — a Poem, whether 
in conception or in execution, one of the most touch- 
ing in our language — who, not in the wide world, 
but ranging day by day around his widowed mother's 
home, " a dexterous gleaner " in a narrow field, and 
with only such slender outfit 

" as the village school and books a few 
Supplied," 

1 Crabbe's Tales of the Hall. This Poem, let me say, I read 
on its first publication, above thirty years ago, with extreme de- 
light, and have never lost my love of it ; and on taking it up 
lately, found I was even more touched by it than heretofore. A 
work which can please in youth and age, seems to fulfil (in 
logical language) the accidental definition of a Classic. [A fur- 
ther course of twenty years has past, and I bear the same wit- 
ness in favour of this Poem.] 



52 KNOWLEDGE IN RELATION TO LEARNING 

contrived from the beaeh, and the quay, and the 
fisher's boat, and the inn's fireside, and the trades- 
man's shop, and the shepherd's walk, and the smug- 
gler's hut, and the mossy moor, and the screaming 
gulls, and the restless waves, to fashion for himself a 
philosophy and a poetry of his own ! 

But in a large subject, I am exceeding my neces- 
sary limits. Gentlemen, I must conclude abruptly ; 
and postpone any summing up of my argument, 
should that be necessary, to another day. 



THE AIM OF UNIVERSITY TRAINING^ 

But I must bring these extracts to an end. To-day 
I have confined myself to saying that that training of 
the intellect, which is best for the individual himself, 
best enables him to discharge his duties to society. The 
Philosopher, indeed, and the man of the world differ 
in their very notion, but the methods, by which they 
are respectively formed, are pretty much the same. 
The Philosopher has the same command of matters of 
thought, which the true citizen and gentleman has of 
matters of business and conduct. If then a practical 
end must be assigned to a University course, I say it 
is that of training good members of society. Its art 
is the art of social life, and its end is fitness for the 
world. It neither confines its views to particular pro- 
fessions on the one hand, nor creates heroes or inspires 
genius on the other. Works, indeed, of genius fall 
under no art ; heroic minds come under no rule ; a 
University is not a birthplace of poets or of immortal 
authors, of founders of schools, leaders of colonies, or 
conquerors of nations. It does not promise a genera- 
tion of Aristotles or Newtons, of Napoleons or Wash- 
ingtons, of Raphaels or Shakespeares, though such 
miracles of nature it has before now contained within 
its precincts. Nor is it content on the other hand with 
forming the critic or the experimentalist, the econo- 

1 From "Idea of a University," Discourse Vii, University 
Teaching. 



54 THE AIM OF UNIVERSITY TRAINING 

mist or the engineer, thougli such too it includes within 
its scope. But a University training is the great or- 
dinary means to a great but ordinary end; it aims at 
raising the intellectual tone of society, at cultivating 
the public mind, at purifying the national taste, at 
supplying true principles to popular enthusiasm and 
fixed aims to popular aspiration, at giving enlarge- 
ment and sobriety to the ideas of the age, at facili- 
tating the exercise of political power, and refining the 
intercourse of private life. It is the education which 
gives a man a clear conscious view of his own opinions 
and judgments, a truth in developing them, an elo- 
quence in expressing them, and a force in urging them. 
It teaches him to see things as they are, to go right to 
the point, to disentangle a skein of thought, to detect 
what is sophistical, and to discard what is irrelevant. 
It prepares him to fill any post with credit, and to 
master any subject with facility. It shows him how to 
accommodate himself to others, how to throw himself 
into their state of mind, how to bring before them his 
own, how to influence them, how to come to an under- 
standing with them, how to bear with them. He is at 
home in any society, he has common ground with every 
class ; he knows when to speak and when to be silent ; 
he is able to converse, he is able to listen ; he can ask 
a question pertinently, and gain a lesson seasonably, 
when he has nothing to impart himself ; he is ever 
ready, yet never in the way ; he is a pleasant com- 
panion, and a comrade you can depend upon ; he 
knows when to be serious and when to trifle, and he 
has a sure tact which enables him to trifle with grace- 
fulness and to be serious with effect. He has the re- 
pose of a mind which lives in itself, while it lives in 



THE AIM OF UNIVERSITY TRAINING 55 

the world, and which has resources for its happiness at 
home when it cannot go abroad. He has a gift which 
serves him in public, and supports him in retirement, 
without which good fortune is but vulgar, and with 
which failure and disappointment have a charm. The 
art which tends to make a man all this, is in the object 
which it pursues as useful as the art of wealth or the 
art of health, though it is less susceptible of method, 
and less tangible, less certain, less complete in its 
result. 



DEFINITION OF A GENTLEMAN^ 

Hence it is that it is almost a definition of a gentle- 
man to say lie is one who never inflicts pain. This 
description is both refined and, as far as it goes, ac- 
curate. He is mainly occupied in merely removing the 
obstacles which hinder the free and unembarrassed 
action of those about him ; and he concurs with their 
movements rather than takes the initiative himself. 
His benefits may be considered as parallel to what are 
called comforts or conveniences in arrangements of a 
personal nature : like an easy chair or a good fire, 
which do their part in dispelling cold and fatigue, 
though nature provides both means of rest and animal 
heat without them. The true gentleman in like man- 
ner carefully avoids whatever may cause a jar or a jolt 
in the minds of those with whom he is cast ; — all clash- 
ing of opinion, or collision of feeling, all restraint, or 
suspicion, or gloom, or resentment; his great concern 
being to make every one at their ease and at home. He 
has his eyes on all his company ; he is tender towards 
the bashful, gentle towards the distant, and merciful 
towards the absurd ; he can recollect to whom he is 
speaking ; he guards against unseasonable allusions, or 
topics which may irritate ; he is seldom prominent in 
conversation, and never wearisome. He makes light 
of favours while he does them, and seems to be receiv- 

1 From "Idea of a University," Discourse vni, University 
Teaching. 



DEFINITION OF A GENTLEMAN 57 

ing when he is conferring. He never speaks of him- 
self except when compelled, never defends himself by 
a mere retort, he has no ears for slander or gossip, is 
scrupulous in imputing motives to those who interfere 
with him, and interprets every thing for the best. He 
is never mean or little in his disputes, never takes un- 
fair advantage, never mistakes personalities or sharp 
sayings for arguments, or insinuates evil which he dare 
not say out. From a long-sighted prudence, he ob- 
serves the maxim of the ancient sage, that we should 
ever conduct ourselves towards our enemy as if he were 
one day to be our friend. He has too much good sense 
to be affronted at insults, he is too well employed to 
remember injuries, and too indolent to bear malice. 
He is patient, forbearing, and resigned, on philosophi- 
cal principles ; he submits to pain, because it is in- 
evitable, to bereavement, because it is irreparable, and 
to death, because it is his destiny. If he engages in 
controversy of any kind, his disciplined intellect pre- 
serves him from the blundering discourtesy of better, 
perhaps, but less educated minds ; who, like blunt 
weapons, tear and hack instead of cutting clean, who 
mistake the point in argument, waste their strength 
on trifles, misconceive their adversary, and leave the 
question more involved than they find it. He may be 
right or wrong in his opinion, but he is too clear-headed 
to be unjust ; he is as simple as he is forcible, and as 
brief as he is decisive. Nowhere shall we find greater 
candour, consideration, indulgence : he throws himself 
into the minds of his opponents, he accounts for their 
mistakes. He knows the weakness of human reason as 
well as its strength, its province and its limits. If he 
be an unbeliever^, he will be too profound and large- 



58 DEFINITION OF A GENTLEMAN 

minded to ridicule religion or to act against it ; he is 
too wise to be a dogmatist or fanatic in his infidelity. 
He respects piety and devotion ; he even supports in- 
stitutions as venerable, beautiful, or useful, to which 
he does not assent ; he honours the ministers of re^ 
ligion, and it contents him to decline its mysteries 
without assailing or denouncing them. He is a friend 
of religious toleration, and that, not only because his 
philosophy has taught him to look on all forms of faith 
with an impartial eye, but also from the gentleness 
and effeminacy of feeling, which is the attendant on 
civilization. 

Not that he may not hold a religion too, in his own 
way, even when he is not a Christian. In that case his 
religion is one of imagination and sentiment ; it is the 
embodiment of those ideas of the sublime, majestic, 
and beautiful, without which there can be no large 
philosophy. Sometimes he acknowledges the being of 
God, sometimes he invests an unknown principle or 
quality with the attributes of perfection. And this 
deduction of his reason, or creation of his fancy, he 
makes the occasion of such excellent thoughts, and the 
starting-point of so varied and systematic a teaching, 
that he even seems like a disciple of Christianity itself. 
From the very accuracy and steadiness of his logical 
powers, he is able to see what sentiments are consistent 
in those who hold any religious doctrine at all, and he 
appears to others to feel and to hold a whole circle of 
theological truths, which exist in his mind no other- 
wise than as a number of deductions. 



LITERATURE 

A LECTURE IN THE SCHOOL OF PHILOSOPHY 
AND LETTERS ^ 

Wishing to address you, Gentlemen, at the com- 
mencement of a new Session, I tried to find a subject 
for discussion, wliich miglit be at once suitable to the 
occasion, yet neither too large for your time, nor too 
minute or abstruse for your attention. I think T see one 
for my purpose in the very title of your Faculty. It is 
the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters. IS ow the ques- 
tion may arise as to what is meant by " Philosophy," 
and what is meant by " Letters." As to the other 
Faculties, the subject-matter which they profess is in- 
telligible, as soon as named, and beyond aU dispute. 
We know what Science is, what Medicine, what Law, 
and what Theology ; but we have not so much ease in 
determining what is meant by Philosophy and Letters. 
Each department of that twofold province needs ex- 
planation : it will be sufficient, on an occasion like this, 
to investigate one of them. Accordingly I shall select 
for remark the latter of the two, and attempt to de- 
termine what we are to understand by Letters or Liter- 
ature, in what Literature consists, and how it stands 
relatively to Science. We speak, for instance, of an- 
cient and modern literature, the literature of the day, 
1 From " Idea of a University," Lecture ii, University Subjects. 



60 LITERATURE 

sacred literature, light literature ; and our lectures in 
tMs place are devoted to classical literature and Eng- 
lish literature. Are Letters, then, synonymous with 
books ? This cannot be, or they would include in their 
range Philosophy, Law, and, in short, the teaching of all 
the other Faculties. Far from confusing these various 
studies, we view the works of Plato or Cicero sometimes 
as philosophy, sometimes as literature ; on the other 
hand, no one would ever be tempted to speak of Euclid 
as literature, or of Matthige's Greek Grammar. Is, 
then, literature synonymous with composition? with 
books written with an attention to style ? is litera- 
ture fine writing? again, is it studied and artificial 
writing ? 

There are excellent persons who seem to adopt this 
last account of Literature as their own idea of it. 
They depreciate it, as if it were the result of a mere 
art or trick of words. Professedly indeed, they are 
aiming at the Greek and Roman classics, but their 
criticisms have quite as great force against all litera- 
ture as against any. I think I shall be best able to 
bring out what I have to say on the subject by examin- 
ing the statements which they make in defence of their 
own view of it. They contend then, 1. that fine writ- 
ing, as exemplified in the Classics, is mainly a matter 
of conceits, fancies, and prettinesses, decked out in 
choice words ; 2. that this is the proof of it, that the 
classics will not bear translating ; — (and this is why 
I have said that the real attack is upon literature 
altogether, not the classical only; for, to speak gen- 
erally, all literature, modern as well as ancient, lies 
under this disadvantage. This, however, they will not 
allow ; for they maintain,) 3. that Holy Scripture pre- 



LITERATURE 61 

sents a remarkable contrast to secular writings on this 
very point, viz., in that Scripture does easily admit 
of translation, though it is the most sublime and beauti- 
ful of all writings. 

Now I will begin by stating these three positions in 
the words of a writer, who is cited by the estimable 
Catholics in question as a witness, or rather as an ad- 
vocate, in their behalf, though he is far from being 
able in his own person to challenge the respect which 
is inspired by themselves. 

" There are two sorts of eloquence," says this writer, 
" the one indeed scarce deserves the name of it, which 
consists chiefly in laboured and polished periods, an 
over-curious and artificial arrangement of figures, tin- 
selled over with a gaudy embellishment of words, which 
glitter, but convey little or no light to the understand- 
ing. This kind of writing is for the most part much 
affected and admired by the people of weak judgment 
and vicious taste ; but it is a piece of affectation and 
formality the sacred writers are utter strangers to. It is 
a vain and boyish eloquence ; and, as it has always been 
esteemed below the great geniuses of all ages, so much 
more so with respect to those writers who were actu- 
ated by the spirit of Infinite Wisdom, and therefore 
wrote with that force and majesty with which never 
man wi'it. The other sort of eloquence is quite the re- 
verse to this, and which may be said to be the true 
characteristic of the Holy Scriptures; where the ex- 
cellence does not arise from a laboured and far-fetched 
elocution, but from a surprising mixture of simplicity 
and majesty, which is a double character, so difficult to 
be united that it is seldom to be met with in compo- 



62 LITERATURE 

sitions merely human. We see nothing in Holy Writ 
of affectation and superfluous ornament. . . . Now, it 
is observable that the most excellent profane authors, 
whether Greek or Latin, lose most of their graces 
whenever we find them literally translated. Homer's 
famed representation of Jupiter — his cried-up de- 
scription of a tempest, his relation of Neptune's 
shaking the earth and opening it to its centre, his de- 
scription of Pallas's horses, with numbers of other 
long-since admired passages, flag, and almost vanish 
away, in the vulgar Latin translation. 

" Let any one but take the pains to read the com- 
mon Latin interpretations of Virgil, Theocritus, or 
even of Pindar, and one may venture to affirm he wiU 
be able to trace out but few remains of the graces 
which charmed him so much in the original. The nat- 
ural conclusion from hence is, that in the classical au- 
thors, the expression, the sweetness of the numbers, 
occasioned by a musical placing of words, constitute a 
great part of their beauties ; whereas, in the sacred 
writings, they consist more in the greatness of the 
things themselves than in the words and expressions. 
The ideas and conceptions are so great and lofty in 
their own nature that they necessarily appear magni- 
ficent in the most artless dress. Look but into the 
Bible, and we see them shine through the most simple 
and literal translations. That glorious description 
which Moses gives of the creation of the heavens and 
the earth, which Longinus . . . was so greatly taken 
with, has not lost the least whit of its intrinsic worth, 
and though it has undergone so many translations, yet 
triumphs over all, and breaks forth with as much 
force and vehemence as in the original. ... In the 



LITERATURE 63 

history of Joseph, where Joseph makes himself known, 
and weeps aloud upon the neck of his dear brother 
Benjamin, that all the house of Pharaoh heard him, 
at that instant none of his brethren are introduced as 
uttering aught, either to express their present joy or 
palliate their former injuries to him. On all sides 
there immediately ensues a deep and solemn silence ; 
a silence infinitely more eloquent and expressive than 
anything else that could have been substituted in its 
place. Had Thucydides, Herodotus, Livy, or any of 
the celebrated classical historians, been employed in 
writing this history, when they came to this point 
they would doubtless have exhausted all their fund 
of eloquence in furnishing Joseph's brethr^ with 
laboured and studied harangues, which, however fine 
they might have been in themselves, would nevertheless 
have been unnatural, and altogether improper on the 
occasion." ^ 

This is eloquently written, but it contains, I con- 
sider, a mixture of truth and falsehood, which it will 
be my business to discriminate from each other. Far 
be it from me to deny the unapproachable grandeur 
and simplicity of Holy Scripture ; but I shall maintain 
that the classics are, as human compositions, simple 
and majestic and natural too. I grant that Scripture 
is concerned with things, but I will not grant that 
classical literature is simply concerned with words. I 
grant that human literature is often elaborate, but 
I will maintain that elaborate composition is not un- 
known to the writers of Scripture. I grant that human 
literature cannot easily be translated out of the par- 
ticular language to which it belongs ; but it is not at 
1 Sterne, Sermon xlii. 



64 LITERATURE 

all the rule that Scripture can easily be translated 
either ; — and now I address myself to my task ; — 

Here, then, in the first place, I observe, Gentlemen, 
that Literature, from the derivation of the word, im- 
plies writing, not speaking ; this, however, arises from 
the circumstance of the copiousness, variety, and pub- 
lic circulation of the matters of which it consists. 
What is spoken cannot outrun the range of the speak- 
er's voice, and perishes in the uttering. When words 
are in demand to express a long course of thought, 
when they have to be conveyed to the ends of the 
earth, or perpetuated for the benefit of posterity, they 
must be written down, that is, reduced to the shape of 
literature ; still, properly speaking, the terms, by which 
we denote this characteristic gift of man, belong to its 
exhibition by means of the voice, not of handwriting. 
It addresses itself, in its primary idea, to the ear, not 
to the eye. We call it the power of speech, we call it 
language, that is, the use of the tongue ; and, even 
when we write, we still keep in mind what was its 
original instrument, for we use freely such terms in our 
books as "saying," "speaking," "telling," "talking," 
" calling; " we use the terms " phraseology " and " dic- 
tion "; as if we were still addressing ourselves to the 
ear. 

Now I insist on this, because it shows that speech, 
and therefore literature, which is its permanent record, 
is essentially a personal work. It is not some produc- 
tion or result, attained by the partnership of several 
persons, or by machinery, or by any natural process, 
but in its very idea it proceeds, and must proceed, 



LITERATURE 65 

from some one given individual. Two persons cannot 
be the authors of the sounds which strike our ear; 
and, as they cannot be speaking one and the same 
speech, neither can they be writing one and the same 
lecture or discourse, — which must certainly belong 
to some one person or other, and is the expression of 
that one person's ideas and feelings, — ideas and feel- 
ings personal to himself, though others may have par- 
allel and similar ones, — proper to himself, in the 
same sense as his voice, his air, his countenance, his 
carriage, and his action, are personal. In other words, 
Literature expresses, not objective truth, as it is called, 
but subjective ; not things, but thoughts. 

Now this doctrine will become clearer by cojjsider- 
ing another use of words, which does relate to objec- 
tive truth, or to things ; which relates to matters, not 
personal, not subjective to the individual, but which, 
even were there no individual man in the whole world 
to know them or to talk about them, would exist still. 
Such objects become the matter of Science, and words 
indeed are used to express them, but such words are 
rather symbols than language, and however many we 
use, and however we may perpetuate them by writing, 
we never could make any kind of literature out of 
them, or call them by that name. Such, for instance, 
would be Euclid's Elements ; they relate to truths 
universal and eternal ; they are not mere thoughts, 
but things : they exist in themselves, not by virtue of 
our understanding them, not in dependence upon our 
will, but in what is called the nature of things, or at 
least on conditions external to us. The words, then, 
in which they are set forth are not language, speech. 



66 LITERATURE 

literature, but rather, as I have said, symbols. And, 
as a proof of it, you will recollect that it is possible, 
nay usual, to set forth the propositions of Euclid in 
algebraical notation, which, as all would admit, has 
nothing to do with literature. What is true of mathe- 
matics is true also of every study, so far forth as it is 
scientific ; it makes use of words as the mere vehicle 
of things, and is thereby withdrawn from the province 
of literature. Thus metaphysics, ethics, law, political 
economy, chemistry, theology, cease to be literature in 
the same degree as they are capable of a severe scien- 
tific treatment. And hence it is that Aristotle's works 
on the one hand, thougb at first sight literature, ap- 
proach in character, at least a great number of them, 
to mere science ; for even though the things which he 
treats of and exhibits may not always be real and 
true, yet lie treats them as if they were, not as if they 
were the thoughts of his own mind ; that is, he treats 
them scientifically. On the other hand. Law or Nat- 
ural History has before now been treated by an author 
with so much of colouring derived from his own mind 
as to become a sort of literature; this is especially 
seen in the instance of Theology, when it takes the 
shape of Pulpit Eloquence. It is seen too in historical 
composition, which becomes a mere specimen of chro- 
nology, or a chronicle, when divested of the philoso- 
phy, the skill, or the party and personal feelings of the 
particular writer. Science, then, has to do with things, 
literature with thoughts; science is universal, litera- 
ture is personal ; science uses words merely as sym- 
bols, but literature uses language in its full compass, 
as including phraseology, idiom, style, composition, 



LITERATURE 67 

rhythm, eloquence, and whatever other properties are 
included in it. 

Let us then put aside the scientific use of words, 
when we are to speak of language and literature. 
Literature is the personal use or exercise of language. 
That this is so is further proved from the fact that 
one author uses it so differently from another. Lan- 
guage itself in its very origination would seem to be 
traceable to individuals. Their peculiarities have given 
it its character. We are often able in fact to trace par- 
ticular phrases or idioms to individuals ; we know the 
history of their rise. Slang surely, as it is called, 
comes of, and breathes of the personal. The connec- 
tion between the force of words in particul^ lan- 
guages and the habits and sentiments of the nations 
speaking them has often been pointed out. And, while 
the many use language as they find it, the man of 
genius uses it indeed, but subjects it withal to his own 
purposes, and moulds it according to his own peculi- 
arities. The throng and succession of ideas, thoughts, 
feelings, imaginations, aspirations, which pass within 
him, the abstractions, the juxtapositions, the compari- 
sons, the discriminations, the conceptions, which are 
so original in him, his views of external things, his 
judgments upon life, manners, and history, the ex- 
ercises of his wit, of his humour, of his depth, of his 
sagacity, all these innumerable and incessant creations, 
the very pulsation and throbbing of his intellect, does 
he image forth, to all does he give utterance, in a cor- 
responding language, which is as multiform as this 
inward mental action itself and analogous to it, the 
faithful expression of his intense personality, attend- 



68 LITERATURE 

ing on his own inward world of thought as its very- 
shadow : so that we might as well say that one man's 
shadow is another's as that the style of a really gifted 
mind can belong to any but himself. It follows him 
about as a shadow. His thought and feeling are per- 
sonal, and so his language is personal. 

Thought and speech are inseparable from each 
other. Matter and expression are parts of one ; style is 
a thinking out into language. This is what I have been 
laying down, and this is literature : not things, not the 
verbal symbols of things ; not on the other hand mere 
words ; but thoughts expressed in language. Call to 
mind. Gentlemen, the meaning of the Greek word which 
expresses this special prerogative of man over the 
feeble intelligence of the inferior animals. It is called 
Logos : what does Loo^os mean ? it stands both for 
reason and for speech, and it is difficult to say which 
it means more properly. It means both at once : why ? 
because really they cannot be divided, — because they 
are in a true sense one. When we can separate light 
and illumination, life and motion, the convex and the 
concave of a curve, then will it be possible for thought 
to tread speech under foot, and to hope to do without 
it — then wiU it be conceivable that the vigorous and 
fertile intellect should renounce its own double, its 
instrument of expression, and the channel of its specu- 
lations and emotions. 

Critics should consider this view of the subject be- 
fore they lay down such canons of taste as the "v^Titer 
whose pages I have quoted. Such men as he is con- 
sider fine writing to be an addition from without to 
the matter treated of, — a sort of ornament superin- 



LITERATURE 69 

duced, or a luxury indulged in, by those who have 
time and inclination for such vanities. They speak as 
if one man could do the thought, and another the 
style. We read in Persian travels of the way in which 
young gentlemen go to work in the East, when they 
would engage in correspondence with those who inspire 
them with hope or fear. They cannot write one sen- 
tence themselves ; so they betake themselves to the 
professional letter- writer. They confide to him the ob- 
ject they have in view. They have a point to gain 
from a superior, a favour to ask, an evil to deprecate ; 
they have to approach a man in power, or to make 
court to some beautiful lady. The professional man 
manufactures words for them, as they are waiited, as 
a stationer sells them paper, or a schoolmaster might 
cut their pens. Thought and word are, in their con- 
ception, two things, and thus there is a division of 
labour. The man of thought comes to the man of 
words ; and the man of words, duly instructed in the 
thought, dips the pen of desire into the ink of devot- 
edness, and proceeds to spread it over the page of 
desolation. Then the nightingale of affection is heard 
to warble to the rose of loveliness, while the breeze of 
anxiety plays around the brow of expectation. This 
is what the Easterns are said to consider fine writing ; 
and it seems pretty much the idea of the school of 
critics to whom I have been referring. 

We have an instance in literary history of this very 
proceeding nearer home, in a great University, in the 
latter years of the last century. I have referred to it 
before now in a public lecture elsewhere ; ^ but it is 
too much in point here to be omitted. A learned Ara- 
^ Position of Catholics in England. 



70 LITEEATUEE 

bic scholar had to deliver a set of lectures before its 
doctors and professors on an historical subject in which 
his reading had lain. A linguist is conversant with 
science rather than with literature ; but this gentle- 
man felt that his lectures must not be without a style. 
Being of the opinion of the Orientals, with whose 
writings he was familiar, he determined to buy a style. 
He took the step of engaging a person, at a price, to 
turn the matter which he had got together into orna- 
mental English. Observe, he did not wish for mere 
grammatical English, but for an elaborate, preten- 
tious style. An artist was found in the person of a 
country curate, and the job was carried out. His lec- 
tures remain to this day, in their own place in the 
protracted series of annual Discourses to which they 
belong, distinguished amid a number of heavyish com- 
positions by the rhetorical and ambitious diction for 
which he went into the market. This learned divine, 
indeed, and the author I have quoted, differ from each 
other in the estimate they respectively form of liter- 
ary composition ; but they agree together in this, — 
in considering such composition a trick and a trade ; 
they put it on a par with the gold plate and the flowers 
and the music of a banquet, which do not make the 
viands better, but the entertainment more pleasurable ; 
as if language were the hired servant, the mere mis- 
tress of the reason, and not the lawful wdfe in her own 
house. 

But can they really think that Homer, or Pindar, 
or Shakespeare, or Dryden, or Walter Scott, were 
accustomed to aim at diction for its own sake, instead 
of being inspired with their subject, and pouring forth 
beautiful words because they had beautiful thoughts ? 



LITERATURE 71 

this is surely too great a paradox to be borne. Rather, 
it is the fire within the author's breast which overflows 
in the torrent of his burning, irresistible eloquence ; 
it is the poetry of his inner soul, which relieves itself 
in the Ode or the Elegy ; and his mental attitude and 
bearing, the beauty of his moral countenance, the force 
and keenness of his logic, are imaged in the tenderness, 
or energy, or richness of his language. Nay, according 
to the well-known line, "facit indignatio versus^ '* 
not the words alone, but even the rhythm, the metre, 
the verse, will be the contemporaneous offspring of the 
emotion or imagination which possesses him. "Poeta 
nascitur, non fit," says the proverb ; and this is in 
numerous instances true of his poems, as well a^of him- 
self. They are born, not framed ; they are a strain 
rather than a composition ; and their perfection is the 
monument, not so much of his skill as of his power. 
And this is true of prose as well as of verse in its 
degree : who will not recognize in the Vision of Mirza 
a delicacy and beauty of style which is very difficult to 
describe, but which is felt to be in exact correspondence 
to the ideas of which it is the expression ? 

And, since the thoughts and reasonings of an author 
have, as I have said, a personal character, no wonder 
that his style is not only the image of his subject, but 
of his mind. That pomp of language, that full and 
tuneful diction, that felicitousness in the choice and 
exquisiteness in the collocation of words, which to pro- 
saic writers seem artificial, is nothing else but the mere 
habit and way of a lofty intellect. Aristotle, in his 
sketch of the magnanimous man, tells us that his voice 
is deep, his motions slow, and his stature commanding. 



72 LITERATURE 

In like manner, tlie elocution of a great intellect is 
great. His language expresses, not only his great 
thoughts, but his great self. Certainly he might use 
fewer words than he uses ; but he fertilizes his sim- 
plest ideas, and germinates into a multitude of details, 
and prolongs the march of his sentences, and sweeps 
round to the full diapason of his harmony, as if KvSd 
yaLCDv, rejoicing in his own vigour and richness of re- 
source. I say, a narrow critic will call it verbiage, 
when really it is a sort of fulness of heart, parallel to 
that which makes the merry boy whistle as he walks, 
or the strong man, like the smith in the novel, flourish 
his club when there is no one to fight with. 

Shakespeare furnishes us with frequent instances of 
this peculiarity, and all so beautiful, that it is difficult 
to select for quotation. For instance, in Macbeth : — 

" Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased, 
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, 
Raze out the written troubles of the brain, 
And, with some sweet oblivious antidote, 
Cleanse the foul bosom of that perilous stuff, 
Which weighs upon the heart ? " 

Here a simple idea, by a process which belongs to 
the orator rather than to the poet, but still comes from 
the native vigour of genius, is expanded into a many- 
membered period. 

The following from Hamlet is of the same kind :— 

" 'T is not alone my inky cloak, good mother. 
Nor customary suits of solemn black. 
Nor windy suspiration of forced breath. 
No, nor the fruitful river in the eye. 
Nor the dejected haviour of the visage. 
Together with all forms, modes, shows of grief, 
That can denote me truly." 



LITERATURE 73 

Now, if such declamation, for declamation it is, how- 
ever noble, be allowable in a poet, whose genius is so 
far removed from pompousness or pretence, much more 
is it allowable in an orator, whose very province it is 
to put forth words to the best advantage he can. Cicero 
has nothing more redundant in any part of his writings 
than these passages from Shakespeare. No lover then 
at least of Shakespeare may fairly accuse Cicero of 
gorgeousness of phraseology or diffuseness of style. Nor 
will any sound critic be tempted to do so. As a certain 
unaffected neatness and propriety and grace of diction 
may be required of any author who lays claim to be a 
classic, for the same reason that a certain attention to 
dress is expected of every gentleman, so to Cicero may 
be allowed the privilege of the " os magna sonaturum," 
of which the ancient critic speaks. His copious, majes- 
tic, musical flow of language, even if sometimes beyond 
what the subject-matter demands, is never out of keep- 
ing with the occasion or with the speaker. It is the 
expression of lofty sentiments in lofty sentences, the 
" mens magna in corpore magno." It is the develop- 
ment of the inner man. Cicero vividlv realised the 
status of a Roman senator and statesman, and the 
" pride of place " of Rome, in all the grace and grand- 
eur which attached to her ; and he imbibed, and be- 
came, what he admired. As the exploits of Scipio or 
Pompey are the expression of this greatness in deed, 
so the language of Cicero is the expression of it in 
word. And, as the acts of the Roman ruler or soldier 
represent to us, in a manner special to themselves, the 
characteristic magnanimity of the lords of the earth, 
so do the speeches or treatises of her accomplished 
orator bring it home to our imaginations as no other 



74 LITERATURE 

writing could do. Neither Livy, nor Tacitus, nor Ter- 
ence, nor Seneca, nor Pliny, nor Quintilian, is an 
adequate spokesman for the Imperial City. They write 
Latin ; Cicero writes Roman. 

You will say that Cicero's language is undeniably 
studied, but that Shakespeare's is as undeniably natural 
and spontaneous ; and that this is what is meant, when 
the Classics are accused of being mere artists of words. 
Here we are introduced to a further large question, 
which gives me the opportunity of anticipating a mis- 
apprehension of my meaning. I observe, then, that, not 
only is that lavish richness of style, which I have no- 
ticed in Shakespeare, justifiable on the principles which 
I have been laying down, but, what is less easy to re- 
ceive, even elaborateness in composition is no mark of 
trick or artifice in an author. Undoubtedly the works 
of the Classics, particularly the Latin, are elaborate ; 
they have cost a great deal of time, care, and trouble. 
They have had many rough copies ; I grant it. I grant 
also that there are writers of name, ancient and mod- 
ern, who really are guilty of the absurdity of making 
sentences, as the very end of their literary labour. 
Such was Isocrates ; such were some of the sophists ; 
they were set on words, to the neglect of thoughts or 
things ; I cannot defend them. If I must give an Eng- 
lish instance of this fault, much as I love and revere 
the personal character and intellectual vigour of Dr. 
Johnson, I cannot deny that his style often outruns 
the sense and the occasion, and is wanting in that sim- 
plicity which is the attribute of genius. StiU, granting 
all this, I cannot grant, notwithstanding, that genius 
never need take pains, — that genius may not improve 



LITERATURE 75 

by practice, — that it never incurs failures, and suc- 
ceeds the second time, — that it never finishes off at 
leisure what it has thrown off in the outline at a stroke. 
Take the instance of the painter or the sculptor ; he 
has a conception in his mind which he wishes to repre- 
sent in the medium of his art ; — the Madonna and 
Child, or Innocence, or Fortitude, or some historical 
character or event. Do you mean to say he does not 
study his subject ? does he not make sketches ? does he 
not even call them " studies " ? does he not call his 
workroom a studio f is he not ever designing, rejecting, 
adopting, correcting, perfecting ? Are not the first at- 
tempts of Michael Angelo and Raffaelle extant, in the 
case of some of their most celebrated compositions? 
WiU any one say that the Apollo Belvedere is not a 
conception patiently elaborated into its proper perfec- 
tion ? These departments of taste are, according to the 
received notions of the world, the very province of gen- 
ius, and yet we call them arts ; they are the " Fine 
Arts." Why may not that be true of literary compo- 
sition which is true of painting, sculpture, architecture, 
and music? Why may not language be wrought as well 
as the clay of the modeller? why may not words be 
worked up as well as colours ? why should not skill in 
diction be simply subservient and instrumental to the 
great prototypal ideas which are the contemplation of 
a Plato or a Virgil ? Our greatest poet tells us, — 

"The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling-, 
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven, 
And, as imagination bodies forth 
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen 
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing 
A local habitation and a name." 



76 LITEHATURE 

Now, is it wonderful that that pen of his should 
sometimes be at fault for a while, — that it should 
pause, write, erase, re-write, amend, complete, before he 
satisfies himself that his language has done justice to 
the conceptions which his mind's eye contemplated ? 

In this point of view, doubtless, many or most writers 
are elaborate ; and those certainly not the least whose 
style is furthest removed from ornament, being simple 
and natural, or vehement, or severely business-like and 
practical. Who so energetic and manly as Demos- 
thenes ? Yet he is said to have transcribed Thucydides 
many times over in the formation of his style. Who so 
gracefully natural as Herodotus ? yet his very dialect 
is not his own, but chosen for the sake of the perfection 
of his narrative. Who exhibits such happy negligence 
as our own Addison ? yet artistic fastidiousness was so 
notorious in his instance that the report has got abroad, 
truly or not, that he was too late in his issue of an 
important state-paper, from his habit of revision and 
recomposition. Such great authors were working by a 
model which was before the eyes of their intellect, and 
they were labouring to say what they had to say, in 
such a way as would most exactly and suitably express 
it. It is not wonderful that other authors, whose style 
is not simple, should be instances of a similar literary 
diligence. Virgil wished his ^neid to be burned, elab- 
orate as is its composition, because he felt it needed 
more labour still, in order to make it perfect. The 
historian Gibbon in the last century is another instance 
in point. You must not suppose I am going to recom- 
mend his style for imitation, any more than his prin- 
ciples ; but I refer to him as the example of a wi-iter 
feeling the task which lay before him, feeling that he 



LITERATURE 77 

had to bring out into words for the comprehension of 
his readers a great and complicated scene, and wishing 
that those words should be adequate to his undertak- 
ing. I think he wrote the first chapter of his History 
three times over ; it was not that he corrected or im- 
proved the first copy ; but he put his first essay, and 
then his second, aside — he recast his matter, till he 
had hit the precise exhibition of it which he thought 
demanded by his subject. 

Now in all these instances, I wish you to observe, 
that what I have admitted about literary workmanship 
differs from the doctrine which I am opposing in this, 
— that the mere dealer in words cares little or nothing 
for the subject which he is embellishing, but ca^ paint 
and gild anything whatever to order ; whereas the art- 
ist, whom I am acknowledging, has his great or rich 
visions before him, and his only aim is to bring out 
what he thinks or what he feels in a way adequate to 
the thing spoken of, and appropriate to the speaker. 

The illustration which I have been borrowing from 
the Fine Arts will enable me to go a step further. I 
have been showing the connection of the thought with 
the language in literary composition ; and in doing so 
I have exposed the unphilosophical notion, that the 
language was an extra which could be dispensed with, 
and provided to order according to the demand. But 
I have not yet brought out, what immediately follows 
from this, and which was the second point which I 
had to show, viz., that to be capable of easy transla- 
tion is no test of the excellence of a composition. If 
I must say what I think, I should lay down, with little 
hesitation, that the truth was almost the reverse of this 



78 LITERATURE 

doctrine. Nor are many words required to show it. 
Such a doctrine, as is contained in the passage of the 
author whom I quoted when I began, goes upon the 
assumption that one language is just like another lan- 
guage, — that every language has all the ideas, turns 
of thought, delicacies of expression, figures, associa- 
tions, abstractions, points of view, which every other 
language has. Now, as far as regards Science, it is 
true that all languages are pretty much alike for the 
purposes of Science ; but even in this respect some are 
more suitable than others, which have to coin words, 
or to borrow them, in order to express scientific ideas. 
But if languages are not all equally adapted even to 
furnish symbols for those universal and eternal truths 
in which Science consists, how can they reasonably be 
expected to be all equally rich, equally forcible, equally 
musical, equally exact, equally happy in expressing the 
idiosyncratic peculiarities of thought of some original 
and fertile mind, who has availed himself of one of 
them ? A great author takes his native language, mas- 
ters it, partly throws himself into it, partly moulds 
and adapts it, and pours out his multitude of ideas 
through the variously ramified and delicately minute 
channels of expression which he has found or framed : 
— does it follow that this his personal presence (as it 
may be called) can forthwith be transferred to every 
other language under the sun ? Then may we reason- 
ably maintain that Beethoven's piano music is not 
really beautiful, because it cannot be played on the 
hurdy-gurdy. Were not this astonishing doctrine main- 
tained by persons far superior to the writer whom I 
have selected for animadversion, I should find it diffi- 
cult to be patient under a gratuitous extravagance. 



LITERATURE 79 

It seems that a reaUy great author must admit of 
translation, and that we have a test of his excellence 
when he reads to advantage in a foreign language 
as well as in his own. Then Shakespeare is sl genius 
because he can be translated into German, and not 
a genius because he cannot be translated into French. 
Then the multiplication-table is the most gifted of aU 
conceivable compositions, because it loses nothing by 
translation, and can hardly be said to belong to any 
one language whatever. Whereas I should rather have 
conceived that, in proportion as ideas are novel and 
recondite, they would be difficult to put into words, 
and that the very fact of their having insinuated them- 
selves into one language would diminish the cj^ance of 
that happy accident being repeated in another. In the 
language of savages you can hardly express any idea 
or act of the intellect at all : is the tongue of the 
Hottentot or Esquimaux to be made the measure of 
the genius of Plato, Pindar, Tacitus, St. Jerome, 
Dante, or Cervantes ? 

Let us recur, I say, to the illustration of the Fine 
Arts. I suppose you can express ideas in painting 
which you cannot express in sculpture ; and the more 
an artist is of a painter, the less he is likely to be of 
a sculptor. The more he commits his genius to the 
methods and conditions of his own art, the less he will 
be able to throw himself into the circumstances of 
another. Is the genius of Fra Angelico, of Francia, or 
of Raffaelle disparaged by the fact that he was able 
to do that in colours which no man that ever lived, 
which no Angel, could achieve in wood ? Each of the 
Fine Arts has its own subject-matter ; from the nature 
of the case you can do in one what you cannot do in 



80 LITERATURE 

another ; you can do in painting what you cannot do 
in carving ; you can do in oils what you cannot do in 
fresco ; you can do in marble what you cannot do in 
ivory ; yoa can do in wax what you cannot do in bronze. 
Then, I repeat, applying this to the case of languages, 
why should not genius be able to do in Greek what it 
cannot do in Latin ? and why are its Greek and Latin 
works defective because they will not turn into Eng- 
lish ? That genius, of which we are speaking, did not 
make English ; it did not make all languages, present, 
past, and future ; it did not make the laws of any 
language : why is it to be judged of by that in which 
it had no part, over which it has no control ? 

And now we are naturally brought on to our third 
point, which is on the characteristics of Holy Scrip- 
ture as compared with profane literature. Hitherto we 
have been concerned with the doctrine of these writers, 
viz. that style is an extra^ that it is a mere artifice, and 
that hence it cannot be translated ; now we come to 
their fact, viz. that Scripture has no such artificial 
style, and that Scripture can easily be translated. 
Surely their fact is as untenable as their doctrine. 

Scripture easy of translation ! then why have there 
been so few good translators ? why is it that there has 
been such great difficulty in combining the two neces- 
sary qualities, fidelity to the original and purity in the 
adopted vernacular ? why is it that the authorized ver- 
sions of the Church are often so inferior to the orig- 
inal as compositions, except that the Church is bound 
above all things to see that the version is doctrinally 
correct, and in a difficult problem is obliged to put up 
with defects in what is of secondary importance, pro- 



LITERATURE 81 

vided she secure what is of first ? If it were so easy 
to transfer the beauty of the original to the copy, she 
would not have been content with her received version 
in various languages which could be named. 

And then in the next place, Scripture not elab- 
orate! Scripture not ornamented in diction, and 
musical in cadence ! Why, consider the Epistle to the 
Hebrews — where is there in the Classics any compo- 
sition more carefully, more artificially written ? Con- 
sider the book of Job — is it not a sacred drama, as 
artistic, as perfect, as any Greek tragedy of Sopho- 
cles or Euripides ? Consider the Psalter — are there 
no ornaments, no rhythm, no studied cadences, no re- 
sponsive members, in that divinely beautiful book? 
And is it not hard to understand ? are not the Pro- 
phets hard to understand ? is not St. Paul hard to 
understand ? Who can say that these are popular com- 
positions ? who can say that they are level at first 
reading with the understandings of the multitude ? 

That there are portions indeed of the inspired vol- 
ume more simple both in style and in meaning, and 
that these are the more sacred and sublime passages, 
as, for instance, parts of the Gospels, I grant at once ; 
but this does not militate against the doctrine I have 
been laying down. Recollect, Gentlemen, my distinc- 
tion when I began. I have said Literature is one thing, 
and that Science is another; that Literature has to 
do with ideas, and Science with realities ; that Litera- 
ture is of a personal character, that Science treats of 
what is universal and eternal. In proportion, then, as 
Scripture excludes the personal colouring of its writers, 
and rises into the region of pure and mere inspiration, 
when it ceases in any sense to be the writing of man, 



82 LITERATURE 

of St. Paul or St. John, of Moses or Isaias, then it 
comes to belong to Science, not Literature. Then 
it conveys the things of heaven, unseen verities, divine 
manif estiations, and them alone — not the ideas, the 
feelings, the aspirations, of its human instruments, 
who, for all that they were inspired and infallible, did 
not cease to be men. St. Paul's epistles, then, I con- 
sider to be literature in a real and true sense, as per- 
sonal, as rich in reflection and emotion, as Demos- 
thenes or Euripides ; and, without ceasing to be re- 
velations of objective truth, they are expressions of 
the subjective notwithstanding. On the other hand, 
portions of the Gospels, of the book of Genesis, and 
other passages of the Sacred Volume, are of the 
nature of Science. Such is the beginning of St. John's 
Gospel, which we read at the end of Mass. Such is 
the Creed. 1 mean, passages such as these are the 
mere enunciation of eternal things, without (so to say) 
the medium of any human mind transmitting them to 
us. The words used have the grandeur, the majesty, 
the calm, unimpassioned beauty of Science ; they are 
in no sense Literature, they are in no sense personal ; 
and therefore they are easy to apprehend, and easy to 
translate. 

Did time admit I could show you parallel instances 
of what I am speaking of in the Classics, inferior to 
the inspired word in proportion as the subject-matter 
of the classical authors is immensely inferior to the 
subjects treated of in Scripture — but parallel, inas- 
much as the classical author or speaker ceases for the 
moment to have to do with Literature, as speaking of 
things objectively, and rises to the serene sublimity 
of Science. But I should be carried too far if I began. 



LITERATURE 83 

I shall then merely sum up what I have said, and 
come to a conclusion. Reverting, then, to my original 
question, what is the meaning of Letters, as contained, 
Gentlemen, in the designation of your Faculty, I have 
answered, that by Letters or Literature is meant the 
expression of thought in language, where by " thought" 
I mean the ideas, feelings, views, reasonings, and other 
operations of the human mind. And the Art of Letters 
is the method by which a speaker or writer brings out 
in words, worthy of his subject, and sufficient for his 
audience or readers, the thoughts which impress him. 
Literature, then, is of a personal character ; it consists 
in the enunciations and teachings of those who have 
a right to speak as representatives of their kind, and 
in whose words their brethren find an interpretation of 
their own sentiments, a record of their own experience, 
and a suggestion for their own judgments. A great 
author, Gentlemen, is not one who merely has a copla 
verhorum^ whether in prose or verse, and can, as it 
were, turn on at his will any number of splendid 
phrases and swelling sentences ; but he is one who has 
something to say and knows how to say it. I do not 
claim for him, as such, any great depth of thought, 
or breadth of view, or philosophy, or sagacity, or know- 
ledge of human nature, or experience of human life, 
though these additional gifts he may have, and the 
more he has of them the greater he is ; but I ascribe 
to him, as his characteristic gift, in a large sense the 
faculty of Expression. He is master of the twofold 
Logos, the thought and the word, distinct, but insepar- 
able from each other. He may, if so be, elaborate his 
compositions, or he may pour out his improvisations, 
but in either case he has but one aim, which he keeps 



84 LITERATURE 

steadily before him, and is conscientious and single- 
f minded in fulfilling. That aim is to give forth what 
he has within him ; and from his very earnestness it 
oomes to pass that, whatever be the splendour of his 
diction or the harmony of his periods, he has with him 
the charm of an incommunicable simplicity. What- 
ever be his subject, high or low, he treats it suitably 
and for its own sake. If he is a poet, " nil molitur 
inepte.^'' If he is an orator, then too he speaks, not 
only " distincte " and " splendide," but also " apte.^* 
His page is the lucid mirror of his mind and life — 

" Quo fit, ut omnis 
Votiva pateat veluti descripta tabella 
Vita senis." 

He writes passionately, because he feels keenly ; for- 
cibly, because he conceives vividly ; he sees too clearly 
to be vague ; he is too serious to be otiose ; he can ana- 
lyze his subject, and therefore he is rich ; he embraces 
it as a whole and in its parts, and therefore he is con- 
sistent ; he has a firm hold of it, and therefore he is 
luminous. When his imagination wells up, it overflows 
in ornament ; when his heart is touched, it thrills along 
his verse. He always has the right word for the right 
idea, and never a word too much. If he is brief, it is 
because few words suffice ; when he is lavish of them, 
still each word has its mark, and aids, not embarrasses, 
the vigorous march of his elocution. He expresses what 
all feel, but all cannot say ; and his sayings pass into 
proverbs among his people, and his phrases become 
household words and idioms of their daily speech, 
which is tesselated with the rich fragments of his lan- 
guage, as we see in foreign lands the marbles of Roman 



LITERATURE 85 

grandeur worked into the walls and pavements of 
modern palaces. 

Such pre-eminently is Shakespeare among ourselves ; 
such pre-eminently Virgil among the Latins ; such in 
their degree are all those writers who in every nation 
go by the name of Classics. To particular nations they 
are necessarily attached from the circumstance of the 
variety of tongues, and the peculiarities of each ; but 
so far they have a catholic and ecumenical character, 
that what they express is common to the whole race of 
man, and they alone are able to express it. 

If then the power of speech is a gift as great as any 
that can be named, — if the origin of language is by 
many philosophers even considered to be nothing short 
of divine, — if by means of words the secrets of the 
heart are brought to light, pain of soul is relieved, hid- 
den grief is carried olf, sympathy conveyed, counsel 
imparted, experience recorded, and wisdom perpetuated, 
— if by great authors the many are drawn up into 
unity, national character is fixed, a people speaks, the 
past and the future, the East and the West are 
brought into communication with each other, — if such 
men are, in a word, the spokesmen and prophets of the 
human family, — it will not answer to make light of 
Literature or to neglect its study ; rather we may be 
sure that, in proportion as we master it in whatever 
language, and imbibe its spirit, we shall ourselves be- 
come in our own measure the ministers of like benefits 
to others, be they many or few, be they in the obscurer 
or the more distinguished walks of life, — who are 
united to us by social ties, and are within the sphere of 
our personal influence. 



DEC 18 1913 



